Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries tagged programming, dropbox

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How can some really large services (like Dropbox) afford to use Python as a primary language, if it’s one to two orders of magnitude slower than other, compiled languages?

Because raw language speed often doesn’t matter that much. In the case if Dropbox the client software spends most of its time waiting for bits to load from the network or from disk. Most large websites spend their time waiting for the database. You can’t speed up network or disk performance by using a faster language.

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Should I use Dropbox instead of Git for 2 coders? In terms of going really fast and working on things at the same time, I’m thinking it may be uber productive to use Dropbox for it’s instant syncing instead of Git/Github. What are the pros/cons?

Dropbox is definitely the wrong tool for this—you’ll find yourself running in to all sorts of weird problems very quickly if you attempt to use it this way.

[... 119 words]