Python un-plugging the Interpreter

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

"Jorgen Grahn" <grahn+nntp at snipabacken.dyndns.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:39:57 -0700, Alex Martelli <aleax at mac.com> wrote:
> > Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> >
> >> A long time ago Greg Stein produced a patch that removed the need for
> >> the GIL, but nobody seemed to want to pay the penalty it extracted in
> >> speed reduction, so it languished unadopted.
> >
> > Perhaps the current wave of dual-core and quad-core CPUs in cheap
> > consumer products would change people's perceptions -- I wonder...
> 
> Maybe it would change /perceptions/, but would normal users suddenly
> start running things that are (a) performance-critical, (b) written in
> Python and (c) use algorithms that are possible to parallellize?
> 
> I doubt it. (But I admit that I am a bit negative towards thread
> programming in general, and I have whined about this before.)
> 

I find this last statement interesting, because it differs so much
from my own attitude - getting a thread running was one of the
first things I did when I started getting to grips with python.

Do you mind "whining" some more - maybe I can learn 
something - threads seem to me to make a lot of things so 
much easier and more natural, as I see them as sequences
that run "at the same time",  and I find this immensely useful
for all sorts of things, as it enables me to think in a simple
linear fashion about parts of complicated things.  And if you
add queues, you have something in your hand that you can 
do quite fancy stuff with in a robust, simple manner...

*grin* before I discovered the queue module, I was using
named pipes to communicate between threads...

So you could say I am a threading freak if you want to, and 
I won't argue.

But I would like to hear the opposite viewpoint..

- Hendrik