[doosra]

I started off hating Python as well. I could not stand a language that didn't terminate statements without semicolons! :) And python just seemed a lot like Perl; when using both languages for large projects my code just seemed to degenerate to "hacky."

But I've grown to like the simplicity of Python. One thing I don't like is its threads implementation, however. Because of the GIL, multithreading (GUI + background thread) just doesn't work right. Maybe I'm using it wrong?

[jakevoytko]

The Right Way for a long time was to run multiple processes. If you absolutely needed threads, then the Other Way That Is Less Correct involved launching threads written in C from a C extension

The Python community seems to be warming to the importance of threads. There are several efforts breaking their swords against the GIL nowadays (Unladen Swallow being the most prominent), and Antoine Pitrou wrote a new GIL to help improve contention [1]. With any luck, by the end of the Python Feature Freeze, there will be some significant headway towards efficient handling of threads within Python, but I'm not holding my breath yet ;)

[1] http://www.dabeaz.com/python/NewGIL.pdf

[jnoller]

If someone were to submit a patch nuking the GIL, I doubt it would be a language change, ergo, the language moratorium (a block on new syntax) does not apply.

[jakevoytko]

I agree. To clarify, I'm hoping that because they're not focusing on language enhancements, they might make some major headway towards nuking the GIL

[eru]

> I started off hating Python as well. I could not stand a language that didn't terminate statements without semicolons! :)

I have exactly the opposite heuristic for syntax. The only thing worse than semicolons and curly braces, are `begin' and `end'.