[civility]

Yes, small careful software teams can make threads work. However, if you start to work with physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and so on who are incredibly smart in their own areas, but who don't have or even value a skill in software, you'll discover they make a real mess out of threaded programs in a way that doesn't happen with separate single-threaded processes.

[oldgeezr]

If that's your audience, then you should give them a library/framework/language that hides all the complexity. I'm currently spending a lot of time working on Python Tornado stuff on an embedded device, and I can say that the lack of threads does not substantially reduce the number of ways you can screw things up.

[civility]

They aren't my audience... they're my coworkers. Sometimes I get to pick how we do a project and sometimes I'm there to help them with their project. If they chose to use threads, I generally try to escape quickly.

No experience or comment on Python/Tornado. We don't really do a lot of web stuff.

But sure, people can screw things up in lots of ways. However, once a threaded program is screwed up, you really only fix it by starting a new version - it's near impossible to incrementally fix race conditions and dead locks - you can't reliably repeat the bug to debug it. Bugs in non-threaded code can at least be tracked down one by one.