[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Stefan Behnel]

Matt Joiner, 11.02.2012 03:24:
> Threading is a tool (the most popular, and most flexible tool) for
> concurrency and parallelism. Compared to forking, multiprocessing, shared
> memory, mmap, and dozens of other auxiliary OS concepts it's also the
> easiest.

Sure, "easy" as in "nothing is easier to get wrong". You did read my post
on this matter, right? I'm yet to see a piece of non-trivially parallel
code that uses threading and is known to be completely safe under all
circumstances. And I've seen a lot.


> Not all problems are clearly chunkable or fit some alternative
> parallelism pattern. Threading is arguably the cheapest method for
> parallelism, as we've heard throughout this thread.

Wrong again. Threading can be pretty expensive in terms of unexpected data
dependencies, but it certainly is in terms of debugging time. Debugging
spurious threading issues is amongst the hardest problems for a programmer.


> Just because it can be dangerous is no reason to discourage it. Many
> alternatives are equally as dangerous, more difficult and less portable.

Seriously - how is running separate processes less portable than threading?


> Python is a very popular language.someone mentioned earlier that popularity
> shouldn't be an argument for features but here it's fair ground. If Python
> 3 had unrestrained threading

Note that this is not a "Python 2 vs. Python 3" issue. In fact, it has
nothing to do with Python 3 in particular.

[stripped some additional garbage]

Stefan