[simeonf]

>Nope. The writer sounds misinformed and is spreading FUD.

>I have successfully used Python's threads to perform concurrent database fetches, http page getters, file uploads in parallel. Yes, there was almost linear speedup.

It's not quite that simple - especially for the novice. Not every IO oriented library is thread safe (urllib2) and not every C extension remembers to give up the GIL, so no - threads do not always automatically get you increased IO throughput.

Worse - other languages do set you up to expect to be able to interleave IO and CPU bound code with threads. This frequently doesn't work well in Python. And finally - yes I have written CPU bound code and I think the techniques (processes, numerical libraries, Cython, alternative runtimes, etc) are sufficient to meet my performance needs it is a little annoying to feel that I'm giving up on 3/4 of the horsepower in my 4 core box by default...