This doesn't imply that preceding implementers are unskilled. Part of this improvement is hindsight, but a not-insignificant part is Python's flexibility.
I can vouch for the apparently unbelievable productivity gains but I'm just not sure how to prove them!
Edit: As for not sharing these gains -- that's part of the point of this post to the official PayPal engineering blog :)
However, it's not crazy to think that a really top notch engineer, who is an expert in Python, and who is operating on a much healthier and efficient team would give you a 60x improvement. Heck, 60x might be too low.
It's not a priori crazy to find a 60x productivity difference between two teams. What is the productivity improvement between one team who spends 1 year on a project and fails to deliver it, vs another team that delivers the project in 4 months? It's not 3x, because 3x better than nothing is still nothing. The second team is literally infinitely more productive.
A story so common they did not feel the need to share it? Even taking the least ludicrous numbers I'm going to say this is entirely made up.
- 3 C++ devs, 40 hours a week for 2 months (8wks) = 960 hours
- 1 Python dev, 40 hours a week for 6 weeks = 240 hours
4x difference in productivity is not a language difference, it's a programmer skill difference.
And just for the sake of seeing the numbers:
- 5 C++ devs, 40 hours a week for 6 months (24 wks) = 4800 hours
- 1 Python dev, 40 hours a week for 2 weeks = 80 hours
= 60x productivity
No.