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@JonYoder@mastodon.technology You got me thinking in more detail why I reflexively avoid #Python now, despite the fact that I wrote two large programs (#OfflineIMAP and #pygopherd) in it, and published a book about it. 1/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology Avoiding #Python - Besides the absurd inconsistencies in https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the-incredible-disaster-of-python-3 and the extreme difficulty verging on the impossibility of properly handling filenames in POSIX (see https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10063-the-fundamental-problem-in-python-3 and https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9938-the-python-unicode-mess ), there is more that makes me shy away. 2/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology It is astonishing to me that #Python still has a Global Interpreter Lock in 2022. https://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock Multithreading in Python is mostly a fiction. There are kludges like https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html which use fork, pipes, pickling, and message passing to simulate threads. But there are so many dragons down that path -- performance and platform-specific ones (different things can be pickled on Windows vs. Linux) that it is a poor substitute. 3/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology Sure, people use #Python for things like #AI work. In this case, Python is merely a shell; the real multithreaded code is in a different language (often C). The way to get performant multithreading out of Python is to not use Python at all. 4/

@jgoerzen @JonYoder I refuse to learn a new language unless it has some sort of multithreading built into it from the start. Even C / C++ multithreading is a nightmare hack. Julia and Go are my favorites these days