Python
Do we really know how powerful Python is?
As emphasized in our previous blog post, Python is a dynamic and influential programming language. This was created by a Dutch programmer named Guido van Rossum, in 1991. Many of today’s most successful tech companies are choosing Python for the back-end of their website. But there are several popular applications and websites, which you would have never guessed that they were built using Python.
Let’s take a look at the 10 top websites powered by Python:
1. INSTAGRAM - the world’s biggest online photo-sharing app, uses Python on its backend.
According to Instagram’s engineering team, "Instagram currently features the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python."
2. GOOGLE - Google is the most widely used search engine in the world with over 75% of the market share.
Longtime Google engineer, Alex Martelli, explained how Google got started using Python in their tech stack: "It all got started, I believe, because the very earliest Googlers (Sergey, Larry, Craig, …) made a good engineering decision: “Python where we can, C++ where we must.”
3. FACEBOOK - With over a billion active users, Facebook is practically synonymous with social media. The company is huge, and so is its tech stack, which includes a lot of languages and technologies. However, according to an official blog post from Facebook, Python is responsible for a solid 21% of Facebook’s infrastructure’s codebase.
4. SPOTIFY - Spotify allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. While Spotify’s website is build using WordPress, the Spotify app is built using Python. Spotify engineer Geoff van der Meer explains how Spotify used Python to code the app’s backend:
"Spotify’s backend consists of many interdependent services, connected by [its] own messaging protocol over ZeroMQ. Around 80% of these services are written in Python."
5. NETFLIX - Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network with more than 33 million members in 40 countries enjoying more than one billion hours of TV shows and movies per month, including Netflix original series. According to the Netflix technology blog.
"Developers at Netflix have the freedom to choose the technologies best suited for the job. More and more, developers turn to Python due to its rich batteries-included standard library, succinct and clean yet expressive syntax, large developer community, and the wealth of third party libraries one can tap into to solve a given problem."
6. UBER - Uber, the ridesharing service, completes over 15 million trips daily.
According to Uber engineers, "at the lower levels, Uber’s engineers primarily write in Python, Node.js, Go, and Java. We started with two main languages: Node.js for the Marketplace team, and Python for everyone else. These first languages still power most services running at Uber today."
7. DROPBOX - Dropbox is a home for all your photos, docs, videos, and files. Have you ever wondered, how does an app like Dropbox scale from 2000 users to 200M users? According to Rajiv Eranki, previously Head of Server Engineering at Dropbox, they used Python for everything . In 2012, Dropbox hired the man who created Python, Guido van Rossum, away from Google. As of this writing, Rossum is still employed at Dropbox, making sure that Dropbox’s Python stack is one of the most efficient in the industry
8. PINTEREST - Pinterest is a social bookmarking site where users collect and share photos of their favorite events, interests, and hobbies. According to Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra,We use python + heavily-modified Django at the application layer. Tornado and (very selectively) node.js as web-servers.
9. REDDIT - Reddit has 330 million monthly active users.
According to an interview at PyCon with Reddit co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, "the biggest thing that has kept us on Python … well, there are two huge things. One are the libraries. […] The other thing that keeps us on Python, and this is the major thing, is how readable and writable it is. When we hire new employees … I don’t think we’ve yet hired an employee who knew Python. I just say, “everything you write needs to be in Python. Just so I can read it. And it’s awesome because I can see from across the room, looking at their screen, whether their code is good or bad. Because good Python code has a very obvious structure. And that makes my life so much easier."
10. BITBUCKET - BitBucket is a web-based hosting service for source code and development projects. It has a user base of 10 million registered users and over 28 million repositories. Approximately 1,816 live websites are using Atlassian Bitbucket. BitBucket is written in Python using the Django web framework.
What can we say? That’s a powerful portfolio! Python has proven that you can build an amazing product with simple, time-honored tools — as long as you create it for the users and don’t have to dig into overcomplicated code.
Our conclusion? Python is everywhere.
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Sources:
[1] https://insights.daffodilsw.com/blog/top-10-applications-built-using-python
[2] https://learn.onemonth.com/10-famous-websites-built-using-python/
[3] https://hackernoon.com/top-seven-apps-built-with-python-2cd8dfd3c00a
[2] https://learn.onemonth.com/10-famous-websites-built-using-python/
[3] https://hackernoon.com/top-seven-apps-built-with-python-2cd8dfd3c00a
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