Over the last few weeks, Tim Bray has written two pieces about threads. The first, On Threads discusses his views on the problems that need to be solved in order to make writing software for multithreaded processors easier. He wrote a follow-up with pointers to other people's reactions, which is also worth looking at. However, the one point that he raised is that dynamic languages like Python have very poor support for parallelism. This is true. Python supports threads, but in a very primitive way: only a single thread can be executing Python code at a time. Thus, there can be no speed-up for parallel Python programs. Solving this problem would be one reason to continue writing my own Python implementation. Unfortunately, I still don't have the time to do it.