On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 17:47, Bruce Eckel wrote: > Early in this thread there was a comment to the effect that "if you > don't know how to use threads, don't use them," which I pointedly > avoided responding to because it seemed to me to simply be > inflammatory. But Ian Bicking just posted a weblog entry: > http://blog.ianbicking.org/concurrency-and-processes.html where he > says "threads aren't as hard as they imply" and "An especially poor > argument is one that tells me that I'm currently being beaten with a > stick, but apparently don't know it."
The problem with threads is at first glance they appear easy, which seduces many beginning programmers into using them. The hard part is knowing when and how to lock shared resources... at first glance you don't even realise you need to do this. So many threaded applications are broken and don't know it, because this kind of broken-ness is nearly always intermittant and very hard to reproduce and debug. One common alternative is async polling frameworks like Twisted. These scare beginners away because a first glance, they appear hideously complicated. However, if you take the time to get your head around them, you get a better feel for all the nasty implications of concurrency, and end up designing better applications. This is the reason why, given a choice between an async and a threaded implementation of an application, I will always choose the async solution. Not because async is inherently better than threading, but because the programmer who bothered to grock async is more likely to get it right. -- Donovan Baarda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
