duggelz

Technically true but misleading. translate.google.com was launched in beta in 2001. But it took until 2005ish to convince Larry and Sergey that "Google Translate" was a better name than "translate.google.com". They had a lot of strong ideas about branding but never did think of a better name. Source: I wrote translate.google.com starting in 2000. Sergey told me it would take "a couple months" when I was hired. Also the Wayback machine shows a version from August 2002 so you don't have to trust a rando on the internet. I entirely agree that it wasn't any good until I handed it off to people who actually knew what they were doing.

As per public statements, Google has ~100 million lines of Python code. Also, Google has used Python very heavily from the start, meaning that some of that code was written in Python 1.x or early 2.x days, before the language had packages, before standard modules like 'logging' or 'unittest', even before booleans(!).

It's just a lot of code to migrate. It takes time.

Disclaimer: Work at Google, wrote some of that code.

If you run windows and don't use Ninite yet, let me make your day:

https://ninite.com/updater/