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Netflix: Python programming language is behind every film you stream
The next time you're streaming on Netflix, you can thank popular programming language Python and the developers who use it for much of the experience.
According to Python developers at Netflix, the language is used through the "full content lifecycle", from security tools, to its recommendation algorithms, and its proprietary content distribution network (CDN) Open Connect, which ensures that content is streamed from network devices that are as close as possible to end users.
[...] At Netflix, many of the network devices that make up its CDN are "mostly managed by Python applications", which do tasks like tracking the inventory of network devices, their health and location.
"Python has long been a popular programming language in the networking space because it's an intuitive language that allows engineers to quickly solve networking problems," notes Netflix senior software engineer, Amjith Ramanujam.
The momentum behind the language is driven by useful libraries that get developed, he adds. These include the NumPy and SciPy libraries for Python, which Netflix uses to perform numerical analysis for its failover services. It's also a heavy user of Redis Queue and Jupyter Notebooks tools for Python.
Netflix also uses the Boto 3 AWS SDK for Python configure its AWS infrastructure. Netflix runs on mostly on AWS infrastructure and last year spent $1.3bn on technology and development.
And of course Python is used extensively within Netflix's machine-learning algorithms for things like content recommendations, artwork personalization, and marketing.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:46PM (2 children)
Far as I have heard, the main difference between Python and other languages is the syntax. Much, much less punctuation. No curly braces, no semicolons. Instead, indentation is required.
Seems a feature of most of the "scripting" languages, as they were unfairly derogated, is the built in associative array data type. Another feature is much more flexibility with standard arrays, don't have to figure out a suitable size at the outset and then live with it, like you do in Fortran and C/C++.
But I wonder what else sets Python apart. Distributed computing? Libraries? Any programming language worth a crap has libraries. I mean, come on, why maintain a NumPy and SciPy library, for just one language, why not also have those same libraries for Haskell, Perl, Java, JavaScript, maybe even C++? Perl's distinguishing characteristic is regular expressions. Fortran has a native exponentiation operator, built in trig, and other mathematical functionality. What does Python have?
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 01 2019, @04:02PM (1 child)
I don't consider that term derogatory. A scripting language is just a language with certain properties, like absence of a separate compilation step, execution of commands directly from the global scope, dynamic typing, automatic memory management, suitability for interactive execution, …
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 01 2019, @07:13PM
One of my former employers had this requirement that all programs had to be written in this proprietary language they were using for everything. I was able to dodge that requirement by using bash shell scripting, which management didn't seem to think counted as real programming.
Also, one of the jobs I did with the shells scripts was the installation of the proprietary language. Since the proprietary language was not compiled, it couldn't very well install itself.