Is Python a suitable language for concurrent programming?
Depends on what you mean. Python is not very good for shared-memory concurrent programming. (That is, threads). The library doesn't have enough good abstractions for locks/synchronization/etc, and, of course the big issue of CPython only allowing one thread to execute bytecode at a time.
At the moment, threads are the fad, but I don't believe that will be scaling very well. As you scale up the number of CPUs, the amount of time wasted on memory synchronization similarly goes up, until you're wasting more time on memory consistency than doing actual work.
Thus, I expect the trend to be more towards async message passing architectures (that is, multiple processes each with their own memory), instead, and I think Python is about as good for that as any existing language. Which is to say: reasonable, but not insanely great.
What is the state of programming theory for concurrency?
For an example of the kind of new language being developed around a asynchronous message passing model, see IBM's poorly-named "X10" language. I saw a talk on it and thought it sounded very promising. What it adds over the usual message passing system is an easier way to name and access remote data and to spawn parallel activities that operates on that data. The part about arrays of data spread out over a number of different "places" (roughly, a CPU and its own memory) and how to operate on them I found especially interesting.
I tried to find their project website, but since their name conflicts with the home automation system, it's hard to google for. Or perhaps they don't have a website.
Short summary information:
http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php? show=event&id=131
Talk slides: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/cascon/CDP04/slides/sarkar.pdf
More talk slides, and a video:
http://www.research.ibm.com/vee04/video.html#sarkar
"Vivek Sarkar, Language and Virtual Machine Challenges for Large-Scale Parallel Systems"
James
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