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> when you think of execution speed in web applications

The whole web application is not CPU bound. The parts which are CPU intensive are rewritten in performant language. For eg, if you are twitter, you still render templates in Rails, and write CPU bound services in Java/Scala. Replacing the whole app with Scala/Java will be pointless.

That doesn't mean that every time you need a service, you can't use Ruby/Python. If all your API server does is check cache for data, load data if there is a cache miss, encode json and return it, Python/Ruby will do just fine.

Understood - was just curious when it comes to CPU intensive portions what you would characterize as performant vs python. Scala/Lift is on my list to check out - So my question now is - if you got to the point of needing to write CPU bound services in Scala, why wouldn't you go ahead and write everything in Scala? Does python offer enough advantages to outweigh having to support multiple languages/environments/ecosystems?

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