No QA and not even a lengthy release process. The question always is - Are you done with the programming? Go release it.

Additionally, people are more tolerant of mistakes made by small companies. Features stopped working? Maybe couple of people will complain.

Google's features stopped working? Media, bloggers.. everyone will have an opinion on why this happened and how to resolve it.

On the other hand, Youtube messes up, people will notice within seconds. Google Video stuffs up, it might takes weeks before anyone notices.

Startups are generally more tolerant of failure and half baked code. Googlers, who have lived there whole lives achieving perfection in school, not so much. I see this all the time at big companies that hire 4.0 GPA from ivy leagues.

Let me guess. You're not a 4.0 GPA from an Ivy League, are you?

A book named "Python Interviews: Discussions with Python Experts" might indicate some bias...

Anyway, I agree with your conclusion: big companies move really slowly in comparison with smaller ones.

I think there's certainly something to be said for the agility of small teams in shipping new features but I also think it's not particularly contentious to suggest that developers are more productive in higher level languages esp. when your focus is on user experience etc.

Yes. Perhaps also brilliant engineers don't want to hack together something half-assed that barely works, but does provide the feature.

I've always liked that youtube uses PHP - much derided, but its declarative "templating" is the easiest, simplest, most direct way to generate html. Maybe that was a factor too.

But I think the youtube engineers might have a more accurate opinion on why they were quicker, than the google video engineers.

> I've always liked that youtube uses PHP

Perhaps you are thinking of Facebook?

> but its declarative "templating"

Do you have any insight onto how much of the templating aspect of PHP is used at Youtube? I know of some large PHP installations where PHP is used as a general programming language that does produce web pages, but the templating aspect of PHP is pretty much minimal, and other engines actually produce the final output.

For a so-called templating language, PHP sure falls short, and thus has a plethora of ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of many other templating languages implemented in it.

https://www.smarty.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Smarty is something from 15 years ago. Nowadays people use Twig which is inspired by Python's Jinja template engine and has similar syntax.

Yet Python has never claimed to be a templating language itself, let alone "the easiest, simplest, most direct way to generate html".

My point is that PHP pretends to be a templating language, then falls flat on its face, so people end up implementing much worse (Smarty, MediaWiki) or sometimes even better (Twig) templating languages on top of it.

In other words, it's simply not true that PHP's "declarative "templating" is the easiest, simplest, most direct way to generate html", or there wouldn't be a need for Smarty, the MediaWiki abomination (which is 17 years old but still widely used on 29 million pages), or Twig.

I'd say "to hack together something half-assed that barely works, but does provide the feature" perfectly describes the PHP development process itself.

YouTube doesn't use php.

I shouldn't have said "uses", but "used". I can't find a reference, but IIRC they used it around the time of the acquisition.

Fun fact: online code editing & hot reload is a thing for python folks.

Remember, YouTube born 13 years ago. That time, online code editing and hot reloading were big things only archived with dynamic languages like Python and Ruby.