Threads - Threat or Menace? - Eric S. Raymond
%
Twisted is amazingly flexible and Pythonic, but that darn
asynchronous event loop makes thread-happy people run in terror.
 - Mike Orr, April 2004
%
I'd no more use non-event based networking code than I'd use a
non-event based GUI toolkit. - Jasper Phillips, June 2004
%
With Twisted, you don't need threads. You don't want threads. Threads 
are actually harmful: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/18/22112/860
 - Jonathan Lange, August 2004
%
If you think threads are hot, use threads and don't waste your time
with tools like Twisted. If you think asynchronous programming presents
serious benefits (as I do), embrace it all the way: it won't be easy
(writing software rarely is), [...] grit your teeth and get on with it.
  - J.P. Calderone, August 2005
%
No inventions have really significantly eased the cognitive difficulty
of writing scalable concurrent applications and it is unlikely that any
will in the near term. [...] Most of all, threads do not help, in fact,
they make the problem worse in many cases. - G. Lefkowitz, August 2005
%
A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program
state machines. - Alan Cox, Linux kernel mailing list, January 2000
%
Use of threads can be very deceptive. [...] in almost all cases they
also make debugging, testing, and maintenance vastly more difficult
and sometimes impossible.
  http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/threads/threads1.html#why
%
The X server, able to execute literally millions of ops/second, is not
threaded; it uses a poll/select loop. Various efforts to make a multi-
threaded implementation have come to no good result. The costs of locking
and unlocking get too high for something as performance-sensitive as
graphics servers. - Jim Gettys
%
Using threads is like having no backups: you stay in denial
of the problem until it bites you, and then it's too late.
 - Nicola Larosa, November 2005
%
One does not use threads for the same reason one does not use global
variables or habitually modify other objects' attributes from outside.
 - Allen Short, December 2005
%
Continuation-based web frameworks (like Seaside) seem lame to me. I'm so
much more impressed by event-based programming, and continuations (used
in that way) seem like a way to avoid explicit events. Events are the
web. Continuations are people who want to make the web into an MVC GUI.
 - Ian Bicking, February 2006
%
Using abstractions like producer/consumer, deferreds, etc., can make
concurrent programming not so hard, and you have to be basically insane to
use threads in your concurrent programming (I've been doing it for about
7 years, and am thoroughly insane). - Josiah Carlson, September 2006
%
Shared state threading is a hack built on to existing languages. [...]
Transaction memory is another hack bolted on to all the previous
concurrency hacks, and somehow it's going to make all the other
concurrency hacks to work reliably. Yeah right.
 - Damien Katz, February 2007
%
The world is getting ready for shared nothing, semi-functional programming.
Get out of the backwater and catch up to your audience. [...] All that
low-level monitor-based [transactional memory] garble? Just leave it
[where] it is now. Walk away from it slowly. Turn your back, and run.
 - Patrick Logan, February 2007
%
Complex problems remain with implementing concurrent systems. But [message
passing] mechanisms like Erlang's raise them to a higher level, closer to
the problem domain. This transactional memory is a false hope covering a
bottomless pit that could have easily been walked around in the first
place. Stay on the path. - Patrick Logan, February 2007
%
Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. [...]
I predict that the programming community at large, even Java prog-
rammers, will finally deprecate multithreaded programming around
seven or eight years from now. That's about par for the course.
 - Steve Yegge, November 2004
%
Threads violate abstractions six ways to Sunday. Mainly by creating race
conditions, deadlock hazards, and pessimistic locking overhead. And still
they don't scale up to handle the megacore teraflop future. [...] So my
default answer to questions such as [...] "When will you add threads to
JavaScript?" is: "over your dead body!" - Brendan Eich, February 2007
%
If you really want "true" multi-threading for Python, use Jython
or IronPython; the JVM and the CLR do support multi-CPU threads.
Of course, be prepared for deadlocks, live-locks, race conditions,
and all the other nuisances that come with multi-threaded code.
 - Guido van Rossum, July 2007
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I'm the first to admit that I'll probably never be able to create
a correct threaded program in C++ or Java, despite years of study.
It's just too hard. - Bruce Eckel, September 2007