[Python-Dev] Pythonic concurrency

[Nick Coghlan]

Bruce Eckel wrote:
> I always have a problem with this. After many years of studying
> concurrency on-and-off, I continue to believe that threading is very
> difficult (indeed, the more I study it, the more difficult I
> understand it to be). And I admit this. The comments I sometimes get
> back are to the effect that "threading really isn't that hard." Thus,
> I am just too dense to get it.

The few times I have encountered anyone saying anything resembling "threading 
is easy", it was because the full sentence went something like "threading is 
easy if you use message passing and copy-on-send or release-reference-on-send 
to communicate between threads, and limit the shared data structures to those 
required to support the messaging infrastructure". And most of the time there 
was an implied "compared to using semaphores and locks directly, " at the start.

Which is obiously a far cry from simply saying "threading is easy". If I 
encountered anyone who thought it was easy *in general*, then I would fear any 
threaded code they wrote, because they clearly weren't thinking about the 
problem hard enough ;)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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