No-one goes out of their way to choose a slower language. People who choose to write something in Python are getting value out of it, or at least believe they are; if writing the program in Go will be more costly (in development time, defect rate, library availability or something else) than writing it in Python then writing it in Go is premature optimization, and if writing it in Go wouldn't be more costly than writing it in Python then why were you thinking of writing it in Python at all?
IME thinking about language performance at all is premature optimization; language performance almost never makes the difference, other between-language differences will swamp any gains from language performance.
> Are you serious? Python code is about 10 times slower than equivalent code in Go.
And 98% of the time it doesn't matter. For most business problems that you'd want to solve with a computer, for modern hardware, Python's performance is more than adequate. It's really not worth worrying about.
No. This is only true if you have a script you run once an hour or so.
If you have a server side application that you hope to be successful then the code will be running all the time and you will pay the price literally because cloud hosting services charge for CPU and RAM usage, which will be off the charts if your server is in Python.
Not to mention all the time you will spend firefighting the performance issues that will inevitably arise. Which also literally costs money in terms of developer salaries and opportunity cost (you can't spend that time to develop new features).
> If you have a server side application that you hope to be successful then the code will be running all the time and you will pay the price literally because cloud hosting services charge for CPU and RAM usage, which will be off the charts if your server is in Python.
Your hosting fees are a tiny fraction of your expenses. Development time is worth a lot more.
> Not to mention all the time you will spend firefighting the performance issues that will inevitably arise. Which also literally costs money in terms of developer salaries and opportunity cost (you can't spend that time to develop new features).
Scaling is a nice problem to have. If you get to the point where you actually need to improve performance, you'll be able to afford to spend time on it.
> Your hosting fees are a tiny fraction of your expenses.
Only when your requirements are low.
Things get very expensive when you start requiring real performance.
> Scaling is a nice problem to have. If you get to the point where you actually need to improve performance, you'll be able to afford to spend time on it.
You don't know that. If you're a startup, it's very likely that you're still not profitable at that point.
IME thinking about language performance at all is premature optimization; language performance almost never makes the difference, other between-language differences will swamp any gains from language performance.