Don your asbestos [was: Making python C-API thread safe (try 2)]

[Steve Holden]

"Harri Pesonen" <fuerte at sci.fi> wrote in message
news:EIL8b.6564$ZB4.1083 at reader1.news.jippii.net...
[...]
> In my opinion, free threading
> is something that *must* be fixed. It is the biggest flaw in a language,
> which I falled in love with just a couple of weeks ago.

I've been keeping quiet about this thread for a while now, and have even
deleted a couple of curmudgeonly draft responses to earlier postings of
yours. However, you've now managed to generate a curmudgeon-trigger event.
The key phrase above is "In my opinion". Apparently you hold your own
opinion in high regard.

Since you only fell in live with Python a couple of weeks ago, it behooves
you to do rather more research than you apparently have before telling its
long-term live-in partners what's wrong with the language and how to fix it.

Just as a matter of interest, have you searched the archives for previous
discussions about implementing free-threading in Python? If so, your
opinions seem apparently untouched by what you would have read.

> And the flaw is
> not in the language, but just in the implementation. I like Python so
> much that I plan to do all my future developing with it, as much as is
> possible. But when I found out about the C API internals, global
> interpreter lock, thread state locking and so on, I was very
> disappointed. So disappointed that I decided to do something to it, at
> some point, perhaps in six months, when I have more time. Meanwhile, I
> hope that someone has heard what I said, and perhaps does something to
> it. It is the biggest problem in the best language there is at the moment.
>
The traditional response to such gushings, which I believe has already come
your way via both python-dev and this newsgroup, is "post a patch". Please
realise that it's only *your* opinion that this is Python's biggest problem.
It may well be a problem for the applications you want to write in it, but
believe me when I tell you, if it were a real problem for the majority of
users it would already have been addressed by some of the better minds in
the software development community.

A little humility wouldn't hurt. comp.lang.python is a very tolerant
newsgroup (when I'm not posting :-) but you are in danger of being perceived
as arrogant and thoughtless.

which-for-all-i-know-you-are-not-ly y'rs  - steve
-- 
Steve Holden                                  http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                 http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/