"> At Google's scale, the usual mantra of "developer time is more expensive than machine time" isn't actually true, hence the decided lack of interpreted languages for high traffic parts of Google... Well, it's true for some uses - when Search UI wants to prototype something, we reach for Python and Django the same as everyone else. It's just that all that code needs to be rewritten in C++ to scale to normal search traffic - which is exactly what a startup would have to do if they got as big as Google, but the vast majority of them never get that big." - Jonathan Tang