Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, all synchronization requires dealing with locks, mutexes, condition variables... As always, by far the best way to interact between threads is to use thread-safe queues (AKA message passing). Luckily, Python has one of those [1]. No complicated synchronisation needed. [1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/queue.html
That's just completely missing the point of threads... but that wouldn't be the first nor the hundreds stupid thing found in Python's documentation. The reason to want threads is to be able to share memory. That's literally why they were created. If you are sending messages instead of sharing memory, you don't need threads. You need something like Erlang processes. The problem is that people who wrote Python never ha…
Yes you could use multiple processes, but you have the extra expense of serialisation, or you could use shared memory but you'd have to administer that and you'd still have the expense of context switches. And inevitably, yes, there is some actual shared state like a logger and modules that you've loaded, which again would be a pain in multiple processes.
You can call a Python thread plus a queue an Erlang process if you like, or say that I should use Erlang processes instead. But the fact is, the Python version works perfectly well for many problems. It does all the things that you typically need if threads: shares state (via the queues), let's you concurrently use the CPU (via C libraries that release the GIL – but no GIL would be even better), and writing blocking IO if you wish. Not missing the point at all.
The developers of Python didn't "suck as programmers" and it doesn't help your point to claim they do. Guido choose to use the GIL because he was OK with multiple threads but not at the expense of single thread performance, and no one showed any solution to that that beats the GIL – until now. (Personally I think the trade off was wrong, and a small hit to single threaded performance would have been with it. But that's different from being ignorant to the fact there was an actual reason.)