Why did Quora choose Python (over PHP and others) for its development?

The python/ruby thing seems to be at an interesting point. Python as a language has a bigger mindshare but none of the python web stacks has close to the adoption that rails does.<p>As far as I can tell there seems to be a lot more peripheral innovation in the ruby camp though, particularly in testing tools. Are there python equivalents to rspec, cucumber, factory_girl/machinist, shoulda, passenger, haml, webrat etc?

<i>The biggest issues with Python are speed and the lack of typechecking.</i><p>Interesting that they took this bit of wisdom away from programming in <i>PHP</i>.<p>I say this because I've never heard anyone consider a lack of type-checking as an issue when considering Python. It's a feature. You either need type-checking or you don't. I suspect that the Quorum engineers didn't need type-checking, so I don't understand why the felt the need to consider it an "issue" with choosing Python.<p>Spare yourself this yammering rant. They chose Python because that's what everyone else at the company was cool with. End of story.

"We didn't want to take the risk of being on Mono [...] It's not clear how long funding will be around for that project"<p>Can anyone elaborate on that or point to some reading?

My biggest problem with Django is that the entire data model layer is designed with relational database in mind (i.e. normalization and JOINs). Many of the new data stores (RDF stores, Google Data Store for App Engine, etc) are inheritantly non-relational.

Charlie Cheever's comment "Python data structures map well to JavaScript data structures" resonates with me. I'm building something in Erlang right now and having come from Python, it's just plain grating.

Wait, you mean this was a serious question? Not a comedy routine?