Why did Quora choose Python for its development?
As a question and answer based interactive website, Quora was built with the long term view of scalability and service quality. A platform that depends on the participation of its community of users, Qu
ora needed a programming language that was reliable, flexible and simple. Quora’s founders recognized the importance of identifying the correct programming language and the possible cost burden which the company may have to bear if a wrong programming language is adopted in the initial stage of development.
Although coding languages like PHP, Java, C#, OCaml and Haskell were considered during the initial development stages, Quora founders chose Python for some clear advantages which the language offered over the others. Some key selection criteria that gave Python an edge were –
1. As a general purpose programming language, Python has a solid ecosystem that supports deep learning.
2. Python’s readability and efficiency makes it a much better language than PHP for creating front end and back end interface for a website like Quora. It allows for building more functions with fewer lines of code, simplifying the development process.
3. Python is an interpreted language with a simple syntax, which is best suited for prototyping. Use of Python also allowed designers, data analysts and non-engineers to write code for Quora, whenever the need arose.
4. Faster ideation with Python also allowed Quora to save time, effort and money.
5. Compared with OCaml and Haskell, Python has a much more extensive standard library and ecosystem, which could support developers in code writing. Python 2.6 is compatible with several libraries already in use, making transition for Quora’s developers very easy.
6. Compared to Java, Python allowed for relatively faster and easier writing of programs with greater inter-operatability.
7. Python released a web framework Tornado as open source, which was readily adopted by Quora for live updating their web service.
8. Although Python is a considerably slow language for web development, recent developments such as PyPy has proven to be fast enough for offering significant speed up. Furthermore, Quora utilizes its backend servers written in C++ for their performance critical codes, thereby allowing developers to not be restricted by Python’s speed.
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