The funny thing is I was getting downvoted by the peanut gallery on proggit and other sites when I was pointing out, years ago, that there is no such thing as "Python", but really "Python 2" and "Python 3".
It's nice to see that pythonistas are starting to accept what an outsider saw give years ago.
Frankly the problem is a culture of overpromising and underdelivering that is endemic to Python. The situation with threading in PHP and Python is really the same: "it almost works" but the PHP community is responsible and says you shouldn't really use threads and the Python community is irresponsible and says "come in the water is fine".
The developers of languages such as PHP, C# and Java value backwards compatibility. Certainly things break from release to release, but some effort is made to minimize the effect, whereas in Python 3 they rewrote important APIs and broke a lot of stuff that they didn't have to break.
Threading in cPython is like recursion, it kind of works but is not the canonical way to write it.
I dare to say that in Python you should always convert a recursive algorithm to the iterative form, because cPython lacks tail call optimization common in functional languages and the default recursion dept is only 999; the same way you should also look for other patterns related to multitasking if the task is CPU bound (or look for GIL-free implementation).
I agree with you that these (and other) Python "gotchas" need more visibility; I don't think the language is broken - one could say the default implementation is broken, IMHO it is just not optimized for a couple classic software patterns. Once you start swimming with the current (using alternative patterns), you probably will find some of the design decisions very pragmatic.
It's nice to see that pythonistas are starting to accept what an outsider saw give years ago.
Frankly the problem is a culture of overpromising and underdelivering that is endemic to Python. The situation with threading in PHP and Python is really the same: "it almost works" but the PHP community is responsible and says you shouldn't really use threads and the Python community is irresponsible and says "come in the water is fine".
The developers of languages such as PHP, C# and Java value backwards compatibility. Certainly things break from release to release, but some effort is made to minimize the effect, whereas in Python 3 they rewrote important APIs and broke a lot of stuff that they didn't have to break.