Ian Bicking wrote a passionate post where he encourages community to put more efforts into Python-for-web-application domain.

I have another complain about the Python (both for language itself and tools and libraries around it). Here it is: Python cannot fully utilize hardware resources. You see, I have several [web] programs running on my machine, some in Java and some in Python. Some of these are the apps I'm writing and debugging myself, some are third-party.

When I'm working on Java app, I have some serious stuff loaded: Eclipse IDE, Tomcat web server, database server, Firefox with API documentation opened, etc. Basically, you need 1Gb of RAM to have it all work smoothly. And even then it takes 12 seconds to redeploy an application. And we all know Java technology has sophisticated JIT compilers which means execution speed is much higher compared to Python.

What do we see in Python? Instance of Vim editor, WebKit/Apache server, may be a Firefox running and a database. That's all. How much resources does it take? Nothing. How long does it take to redeploy a WebKit application? Nothing again. In fact, you could develop Python app on some archaic Celeron-666/256 Mb box and notice little difference with modern Athlon 2800+/1Gb. At least, that was my experience.

What the heck?

If the language can't make a serious load out of modern hardware it can't be nothing else then a toy language, right? Programming is hard and it must feel that way.

Therefore, I ask the community to put more efforts to "grow" both the language and the tools. The day I see my python application deployed in a 12 seconds to a WSGI-backed WebKit I know: we have a serious, mature language. No, not a "language" - it'd be called a "platform" by then. Definitely.