I don’t see much more useful here than understanding the asyncio primitives and available synchronization abstractions, just a different API mostly overlapping the same need
To be clear, trio also has more than one way to wait for a task - any await is the same (e.g. `await trio.sleep(N)` (e.g. `await asyncio.sleep(N)`). I think maybe you’re getting at waiting for a group of tasks?
To be precise, to wait for a task its actually just await. Theres no ensure_future etc. Trio doesn't have the concept of futures or promises at all, and await f() is treated as a single piece of syntax, so in practice it doesn't have "awaitables" either.
An interesting idea, essentially Trio restructures concurrent code to more closely resemble parallel code, which innately has the property that the concurrency is not observable, ie. the black box property. It's a little more general than strict parallel code though because task spawning is reified as a first class value via which the program can spawn new tasks.
I'm not sure it's totally novel though. For instance, C# has AsParallel() extensions which let you run collection operations in parallel (similar functions in Haskell too). It has the same black box behaviour described by the article, and there's an equivalence between direct control flow in code and indirect control flow reified as a data structure, ie. Haskell's case that lazy evaluation and lists are the only control flow construct you need.
Still, it's an interesting imperative incarnation of the idea!
There were 2 things about asyncio that I really didn't like:
1. the library constantly changed under our feet and that also meant that Stack Overflow articles were all over the place between Python 3.5 and 3.7.
2. I don't think I've ever successfully mocked an async function in python. This made testing async code in python, especially mocking responses from an async web call (an obvious use of async in python) very difficult, if memory serves me. It's been several months since I've used async in python (job change) though, so maybe it's gotten easier or maybe the exact mocking test case issues I had are different drom what I think.
We've been using Twisted at work for over a decade. We are finally completing our upgrade to python3 after much effort and pain. That means we are starting to look into the native async functions in python3.
What I realized the other day is that Twisted treats everything like an asyncio Task. That seems to make most of the more confusing gotchas just disappear. I suppose it's a matter of what you're used to though.
requests is “clean enough” if you only use the highest level functionalities like making stateless requests and read out the response. I wouldn’t say it fits the description once you go past that.
Zen of Python is an illusion. Complex things are complex, there’s simply no way to have an interface that’s always clean, useful, and maintainable.
A more charitable view is that they signify an API that evolved from callback-based APIs like Twisted over many years and made nicer APIs like curio or trio only possible (whose features/insights slowly feed back into asyncio but backward compat keeps the warts around).
What would be the essence of that zen? A ridiculously slow interpreter? Littering your directories with .pyc files? The world's worst package and dependency management?
Don't get me wrong, python is a lovely language when the universe aligns perfectly. But buggy libraries with fragmented interfaces are everywhere in the python community, and any zen that could have been had by pythons expressiveness gets obliterated by the various other warts and faults of the ecosystem. It's just a tool, not a form of enlightenment.
Zen merely means meditation. It’s a practice, not a state of being or enlightenment.
I think the confusion comes about because many people use Tao and zen interchangeably. The Tao is supposed to represent a total understanding of the underlying universal principals, which can be seen as a form of enlightenment.
However Zen is not that.
The zen of python would represent a way to meditate while coding in python. Though I will admit the actual document reads more like a Tao, and it was originally called “the way of Python” (Tao also translates as the way).
https://trio.readthedocs.io/
For a group of tasks, use a nursery.
Edit: correction