[jessaustin]

This is really a matter of taste. You should at least be aware that you're monkeypatching, and code and test accordingly. Many people have good results from monkeypatching, and even more have good results from calling well-written-and-tested libraries that monkeypatch.

[codygman]

But monkey patching turns python from explicit to implicit. It just doesn't feel pythonic to me, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

A big reason I use (and enjoy using) python is because it doesn't feel like a "bolted on" solution. All current concurrency options for python feel bolted on to me personally.

The python internals weren't designed for this, which is the reason they have to use monkey patching. It doesn't mean that you can't make something work, but it means the language/interpreter sure aren't going to help you make it work.

I just couldn't write something which depends on speed and concurrency in python right now, knowing there are solutions much better designed for the problem. Python holds a special place in my heart, but unicode and concurrency aren't so good right now.

However, this future async support and unicode support in python 3 very much excites me!

[rdtsc]

> It just doesn't feel pythonic to me, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

But how does a tangled mess of callback1 callback2 callback3 feel when all you want to do is do a couple of db reads and writes while processing a simple shopping cart. Is that Pythonic?

> The python internals weren't designed for this, which is the reason they have to use monkey patching.

So fix the internals. Here is a practical way people use Python every day, make that the default, don't revert to some academic or callback mechanism.

> I just couldn't write something which depends on speed and concurrency in python right now, knowing there are solutions much better designed for the problem.

See that is what saddens me. gevent and eventlet do let you write reasonably good and concise IO concurrent code. Some have run large sites and deployments with it. I haven't found any major slowdowns or downsides to switch yet. Because I it is easy and simple to experiment, I'll always try Python first, even though later I might switch to Go or Erlang.

[codygman]

I agree, we should fix the internals. Haskell didn't have concurrency by default and things turned out pretty well there.

I actually did try out a solution based on gevent and eventlet before switching to Go.