Python 2.0 and Stackless

[Mike Fletcher]

Users:
	[Image of seething mass of Pythonistas crowded around the palace's
walls]
	We want Stackless!
	[Montage of chants, rallies, sneaking Chris into the CVS repository
in amazing feats of daring: soon to be the cultural myth of a generation]
	See, here's cool stuff you can do with it.
	[Closeup of the impassioned faces in the crowd]
	Look, we're building it into products and everything.
	[Shots of disheartened shop-keepers, their clean, well-lighted
produce rotting on the shelves, their head in hands, a gun sitting on the
counter next to them]
	Tismer for Sainthood!
	[An ancient face is illumed with the glory of stackless streaming
from his monitor, confirming his faith in all things stackless]
	Give us Stackless or give us a 400% speedup (greedy users, you don't
get that much from Stackless, you're just speed-hungry!), fine-grained user
control of huge numbers of threads (in particular, the ability to readily
suspend, interrupt, and create large numbers of them), and continuation
support.
	[The troops close in, close-ups of tanks firing into the crowd.
Screaming, death.  A shot of the aftermath, aid workers picking up broken
motherboards.  A stretcher with a young man in critical condition clinging
to a shattered CD marked "-stack"]


Tim:
	[Sitting quietly in the presidential suite, his natty white suit
sparkling with sequins and contrasting artistically with the dark-red couch
on which he reclines.  He nods at the question, acknowledging the young
reporter's point.]
	What is it that the users want?  I ask you, Miss Summers, who speaks
for the people?  Is it armed bandits in the street, or is it their duly
elected government for life?
	[He leans forward, his eyes address the camera directly]
	Do you know how many hard-disks our aid workers had to reformat
after the rebel's attack last week?  50!  These animals are a danger to the
decent, law-abiding coders who are our constituency.  They don't care about
some abstract flow-control system, they just want their code to run.
	[He lowers his voice, seemingly abashed by his fervour]
	You and I may like the idea of stacklessness, but what does it
matter to these people.  Would you have me force a change of this magnitude
on an unwilling populace?  I can not coerce my people by force into
participating in some experiment that they can barely understand.  My
people, the real people, would never stand for it.
	The people don't want Stackless, Miss Summers.

:)  Enjoy,
Mike

PS: Why did CLP get so contentious all of a sudden?  I swear I saw a huge,
mind-swallowingly circular discussion on licensing issues a few days ago!
Luckily I got away using my trustly delete key and a nearby project at work,
but scared the bejeevies out of me.  (I might have hit reply!  Oh, the
terror! I'm still shaking (oh, wait, that's dancing to the music).)

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Peters [mailto:tim_one at email.msn.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2000 10:56 PM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: RE: Python 2.0 and Stackless


[Michael Hudson, on Stackless]
> ...
> It makes the implementation more complex.  This is a real downside.
> That said, I think I'm in favour of it going in - it's just *cool*,
> and that's what I like about Python.  Sod technical arguments <wink>.

But technically, it's a jewel!  It's the users who don't want to wrap their
heads around something too simple to be understood -- sod users <wink>.

too-cool-to-drool-ly y'rs  - tim



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