ESR "Waning of Python" post

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 6:43 PM Thomas Jollans <tjol at tjol.eu> wrote:
> The gist is that the GIL is a problem only for relatively few problems
> (e.g. games that need limited-scale low-latency parallelism). Most of
> the time, you either only need one process in the first place, or you
> can take full advantage of your multi-core machine, or multiple
> multi-core machines, using multiple processes (with ipyparallel or whatever)

Right. If someone goes on a long rant saying how he wasn't able to
write his device driver in Python, and he's giving up on the language
and going to C, would that be taken as an affront to Python, or the
knell of the language, or anything like that? No, it'd be "well,
that's not Python's role". But if someone needs to manage a billion
teensy sub-jobs and then finds that Python is unsuitable, it's clearly
the GIL's fault, and this is a fundamental flaw in the language, and
we should all move to Go for all our coding because Python utterly
sucks. Why? Why not just let other languages do things differently,
and have other design tradeoffs?

This is one fairly specific class of problem which is poorly served by
Python's/CPython's design. (I'm not sure how much of this could be
done differently in an alternative implementation; so far, we haven't
seen a "Python for embarrassingly parallel problems" implementation,
so I suspect part of it is language design.) So pick a different
language *for those problems*.

ChrisA