Hulu, Twitter, Techcrunch, etc are written in Ruby.
Yahoo, Facebook, and tons of big social networks are written in PHP.
But what are some big top-name enterprise sites written in Python?
I am going to spend my time investing in either Python (w/ Django) or Ruby (w/ Rails) to create a data-intensive web application that has a personalization/recommendation tool (similar to Amazon).
Coming from a PHP background (OOP, Zend Framework), which would be best?
Django is used to run a wide variety of sites. You can see all the ones that have been registered at www.djangosite.org. Since Django was born from developers working in the news industry, you'll find that a lot of news organizations have quickly embraced it.
However, as djangosites illustrates, its been used for everything from personal blogs, to photo sharing sites, to social networks (Cloud27 was specifically built to show off the Pinax social networking suite). Pownce, a social network based around music and file sharing, was written using Django, but its creators had to close their doors when they were hired elsewhere.
Its also worth noting that the Google App Engine uses Django's template language. Not specifically Python, but heavily influenced by a Python framework.
youtube and reddit both are, i believe. oh, and jaiku uses twisted, so i assume the rest of it is in python as well.
As Autoplectic said, Reddit was rewritten from Lisp to Python.
Here's the tale.
Chesspark is another personal favorite.
See Chesspark Design Details Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Ok, this might be not an enterprise class site, but for a gaming nerd like me, http://www.curse.com is written in python.
What aspect of "big" are you interested in?
Scaling - either of Python/Django or Ruby/Rails will almost certainly handle any type of traffic you're going to throw at it.
Large code base - similar maintainability between RoR and Django. It comes down to personal preference (I prefer Python)
Support and community - both RoR and Django have large, active, helpful communities. Neither are going away, both are healthy and growing, used by both large and small entities.
I don't think you'll find the "big site" aspect to be a particularly helpful determinant of what you use. Both are easy to pick up; try them out and see what feels more natural to you. I tried both, liked both initially, but ended up strongly preferring Django.
It looks like google help files are all in python
example: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69570&topic=13260
see the answer.py? That's a python script.
(unless of course they did something unnatural with the .py extension... But I doubt it)
Also, see http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture for Youtube architecture and their use of python.
We are using Django on Noovo, currently about 50k lines of code. I would choose web.py if I had to do it again. We also do recommendations etc.
Btw, you won't make it without unit tests, so have everything covered from the start.
FriendFeed is written in Python.
You could also see the source codes of some big Google App Engine apps:
Andalucia.org is using Django (all except home page, that will be migrated soon). Some links: