[Haskell-cafe] Python's big challenges, Haskell's big advantages?

[Arnar Birgisson]

Hi Manlio and others,

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 14:58, Manlio Perillo <manlio_perillo at libero.it> wrote:
>> http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Shuttleworth-Python-needs-to-focus-on-future--/news/111534
>>
>> "cloud computing, transactional memory and future multicore processors"
>>
>
> Multicore support is already "supported" in Python, if you use
> multiprocessing, instead of multithreading.

Well, I'm a huge Python fan myself, but multiprocessing is not really
a solution as much as it is a workaround. Python as a language has no
problem with multithreading and multicore support and has all
primitives to do conventional shared-state parallelism. However, the
most popular /implementation/ of Python sacrifies this for
performance, it has nothing to do with the language itself.

Stackless Python is an interesting implementation of the CSP+channels
paradigm though. It has been quite successfully used for a few large
projects.

> And scalability is not a "real" problem, if you write RESTful web
> applications.

Of course scalability is a "real" problem, ask anyone who runs a big
website. I don't see how RESTful design simply removes that problem.

cheers,
Arnar