Oh yeah, I make no claim that any of my experiences are anywhere near universal. Basically no part of the American experience is.

Or driving in general. As an American who didn't get a driver's license until I was 21 (gasp! so old) due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can't comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn't know how to use a passport as an ID.

The only other people I've met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem... the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like "simply drive to your driving test appointment"...

Yeah, a small village. It would have been a half-hour bus ride to the town of ~5000, but they couldn't compel all students to get a passport, and the nearest pool in the US would have been about an hour and a half away, so it was never part of the curriculum. Some kids had their parents drive them to Canada after school for private (expensive?) swimming lessons, but it wasn't standard.

American here. The nearest swimming pool to my hometown was in Canada. So no.

Edit: I don't think this is normal

prison

I wonder if YouTube still uses Python to this day

We do not.

Not relevant to lemmy (yet), but this does break down a bit at very large scales. (Source: am infra eng at YouTube.)

System architecture (particularly storage) is certainly by far the largest contributor to web performance, but the language of choice and its execution environment can matter. It's not so important when it's the difference between using 51% and 50% of some server's CPU or serving requests in 101 vs 100 ms, but when it's the difference between running 5100 and 5000 servers or blocking threads for 101 vs 100 CPU-hours per second, you'll feel it.

Languages also build up cultures and ecosystems surrounding them that can lend themselves to certain architectural decisions that might not be beneficial. I think one of the major reasons they migrated the YouTube backend from Python to C++ isn't really anything to do with the core languages themselves, but the fact that existing C++ libraries tend to be way more optimized than their Python equivalents, so we wouldn't have to invest as much in developing more efficient libraries.