I noticed that most of the largest web platforms that use PostgreSQL as their primary database, also use Python as their primary back-end language. Yet, according to every benchmark I could find over the last couple of years, back-end languages like PHP, HHVM, and Node.JS outperform Python by 2x to 8x!
So here are my questions:
1) Why do the largest web applications that use PostgreSQL also use Python, even though Python is significantly slower than it's biggest competitors?
I've no experience of whether this is true. But in most cases, especially web platforms, the speed of the language is almost irrelevant. Most computers are fast enough these days that (for most applications) they spend most of their time in IO_WAIT, whether you write your code in C or in shell script. If you have strong experience in a particular language then you should use that language, and invest time in optimising your data structures and developing faster algorithms.
