[python-advocacy] addressing scalability concerns

[Brad Allen]

Hello,

Today at work, one of our prospective customers raised concerns about
Python's scalability. We're sending them our stress test reports to
prove the horizontal scalability of our application, but we also
wanted to craft a good response.

I've posted it here, removing our product-specific details, in hopes
of getting some feedback. It would be nice to have a statement
somewhere on the Python website to address these kinds of concerns.

> 3.Python - They had some concerns about python's ability to scale and some "memory leaks". Please highlight the robustness of python and all the good stuff

Python has proven scalability at companies such as Google, YouTube,
NASA, Walt Disney Pictures, and Industrial Light & Magic (see
http://www.python.org/about/success/)

Nothing about the Python language encourages writing applications with
memory leaks. In fact, Python makes it easier to avoid memory leaks
than many programming languages, due to the clarity and sparseness of
the code in comparison to lower level languages where complexity
results in denser code. Python excels at making complexity manageable.
In addition, it has a built-in garbage collector which means
developers don't need to worry about allocating/deallocating memory.

The speed difference between Python and low level languages (such as
Java or C++) is often misunderstood. Python is written in C, and many
complex operations in Python actually occur at "C" speed. Bottlenecks
are more common in I/O than the CPU, and in cases where CPU matters,
we have good options available such as writing C extensions, or
scaling horizontally with multiple processes.