HACKER Q&A
📣 akhdanfadh

Is Python Used in Production?


I understand that Python is popular in educational settings due to its approachable syntax, and it is obviously ubiquitous in ML/AI development thanks to libraries like PyTorch and the broader scientific computing ecosystem.

But what about beyond these domains? I'm interested in hearing from practitioners about any production usage across the industry.


  👤 lordkrandel Accepted Answer ✓
https://www.odoo.com https://www.github.com/odoo/odoo

Opensource + enterprise parts are all in Python + JS + PostgreSQL. Soon 6k employees.


👤 rzzzwilson
There is a probably outdated page of python success stories:

https://www.python.org/about/success/

One example not mentioned in the above page is reddit which is written in python. I once helped maintain the ANUGA system, mostly python, which was being used to simulate the effects of tsunamis on a shoreline. It can be used for a lot of other things such as riverine flooding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANUGA_Hydro


👤 necovek
Yes. I've been at companies serving millions of requests per hour with Python backends.

There are some gotchas to be wary of, and obviously running costs are higher than some other languages/runtimes, but the lower cost of project iteration and development still makes it worthwhile.

OTOH, because of the reputation of being easy to pick up, and thus tons of people murking around with it, you'll get all sorts of crappy code and developers with many years with Python, but no real experience writing production quality code.


👤 ferguess_k
(Close to ML/AI) Python is heavily used in DE (Data engineering) -- Many companies are moving away from Scala/Java because the Python binding is efficient enough and they can find a lot more talents who can code in Python than in JVM languages.

Beyond that, I believe Python is also used to program backends but it is not as popular as other BE languages.