Choice of language is not what makes things succeed or fail in production.
Team best practices, enforcement of coding style and technique, good project management, infrastructure, and team cohesion etc.
And weeding out bad engineers who think that "switching to a new [language|framework|religion]" will solve all problems.
10+ years ago Facebook itself did a remarkable job of scaling up, with hardly any outages, a PHP LAMP stack thingy to one of the hugest traffic websites in the world. Meanwhile back then Twitter mucked around with every novel technology they could find or invent, and had constant outages.
Also Google didn't "switch to Golang." There's plenty of C++, Java, Python there. I worked there for 10 years and encountered only a handful of Go projects. Lots of cloud services in C++.
Would I personally choose Python for a project? No, I don't like it, and I work in Rust full time because I prefer it. But if I worked at Meta / Instagram and had a team of Python engineers and existing libraries & infrastructure, this would be the right approach.
Also, what's really different from Instagram? You change the picture for a short text and many other features already existed - comments, likes, subscriptions, recommendations, personal messages...
I think this is just an Instagram skin with some feature flags.
Team best practices, enforcement of coding style and technique, good project management, infrastructure, and team cohesion etc.
And weeding out bad engineers who think that "switching to a new [language|framework|religion]" will solve all problems.
10+ years ago Facebook itself did a remarkable job of scaling up, with hardly any outages, a PHP LAMP stack thingy to one of the hugest traffic websites in the world. Meanwhile back then Twitter mucked around with every novel technology they could find or invent, and had constant outages.
Also Google didn't "switch to Golang." There's plenty of C++, Java, Python there. I worked there for 10 years and encountered only a handful of Go projects. Lots of cloud services in C++.
Would I personally choose Python for a project? No, I don't like it, and I work in Rust full time because I prefer it. But if I worked at Meta / Instagram and had a team of Python engineers and existing libraries & infrastructure, this would be the right approach.