IronPython and Jython have no GIL. Unfortunately, IronPython is no longer being maintained and the last release was over a year ago.

One of the most common complaints about Python is the limitations of its lambdas, namely being one line only without the ability to do assignments. Obviously, Python's whitespace treatment is a major part of that (and, IIRC, I've read comments from you to that effect). I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about possible syntax for a multi-line lambda, and the best I've come up with is trying to shoehorn some unused (or little used) symbol into a C-style curly brace, but that's messy at best. Is there a better way, and do you see this functionality ever being added?

Python does support threading. The issue is that CPython implementation has the GIL to contend with. IronPython did away with the GIL, but it's no longer being maintained. Also, http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4105821&cid=44608065 beat you too it.

As somebody else has pointed out, it's a <tt> tag. That tt stands for "teletype." That your system (and mine) happen to represent that with courier doesn't change the fact that it's a typewriter font. Monospace is great for code, but pretty lousy for actually reading.

There needs to be a "typewriter font -1." Not arguing with what you're saying, but it's an annoying font.

That's really a terrible voting algorithm. For many, many reasons:

• First, there's the whole issue of averaging 1-10 ratings. First, those number will not be uniformly distributed. Rather, they'll be clustered in the 1-2, 5, 8-10. Second they aren't ratio quantities, so you just can't average them. By this I mean that 1/10+2*10/10 = 21/30 scores the same as 3*7/10. That really doesn't make sense. A reddit style voting system will address this, but requires a larger sample size.
• Ignoring the first issue, your first round has fairly low confidence of selecting the best stories for review. Let's be generous and assume that of your initial 20 reviewers half actually review it. Let's further assume none of them lie and just call it e.g. a 7/10 without reading it. You still have a sample size of 10. By terribly misusing the CLT because the sample is too small, we would assume the results are normally distributed about the "true" mean with a standard deviation of approximately 1.68. That means that if a score averages 8/10 after 10 reviews, there's a 17% chance that it's really 6.3 or worse. Similarly, a 6/10 average has 17% chance of really being 7.68. Not very encouraging.
• The above makes some very, very bad assumptions (e.g. nobody just says "Screw it; i'm putting down 7.") and misapplies the CLT. In reality, you have no idea what your confidence interval is, other than that it's not tight.
• You can increase the sample size for part 1, but that loses the benefits of your scheme and, as people are bothered to review more, they'll participate more rarely unless you reward them well.

In short, it's a pretty meaningless system based on a flawed average with unknown, but low, confidence in the scores.

Out of curiosity, can somebody please explain why this was modded "troll?"

I absolutely agree that there shouldn't be repercussions for mistakenly reporting somebody as a sockpuppet. However, if an accusation appears baseless and motivated by personal feelings (and this guy's accusation clearly was, based on his absurd portrayal of my "edit" as being "an attack on the legitimacy of scholarly interpretation"), somebody should look at the entire situation. In a case like this, where it was pretty clearly an admin abusing his status and better knowledge of the system to coerce a result, there should be an official response in the form of a public reprimand/apology with the admin potentially losing his status. Having an elevated status means that admins should have to behave better.

That would have helped, but I would have still walked away upset that basically an admin can try to abuse the system without any sort of consequence. I think a more appropriate response would have been, "here's a pretty baseless accusation of sockpuppetry; let's look into this some more."

I would have liked it had one of the other admins investigating the sockpuppetry allegation would have taken a moment to say, "this guy is clearly out of line; maybe we should address this somehow." Basically, I'm left with the impression that admins (or at least certain ones) view their articles as their own private turf and use their positions as admins and their better knowledge of the system (or appearance of better knowledge) to bully people trying to help. Some sort of pro-active check on this would be a nice start. I know I'm not the first person to experience this, but I still have no idea how to file a complaint against an admin, nor do I have any reason to assume it would be handled in an open and impartial manner.

Quite possibly, but I wouldn't be trying to get the banned for sockpuppetry on the basis of "there's no way three people could disagree with me." Also, I'm not an admin, so there's that.

I can give you an example. There was what seemed to be to be an outlandishly strange interpretation of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" included in the song's page. I joined a discussion in the comments (not in the page proper!) advocating removing it. Turns out, it was added by a wikiadmin and he liked the pseudo-intellectual veneer it added, so, rather than admit he's super-outvoted in the comments page, he accuses me of running sockpuppets (because, of course, there's no way multiple people could think he's wrong!). I had to write a responses defending myself. The "case" against me stalled for lack of evidence, but it was never officially dismissed and can be reopened. Since then, I've mostly stuck to typo-fixing, because, frankly, improving wikipedia isn't worth that sort of time and aggravation.

Has this guy actually contributed anything new, or is he just finding stuff he thinks is cool and cobbling it together? FWIW, I've been unable to find even a single paper with his name on it.

Tungsten, not lead. Tungsten has almost the same density. In fact these fine folks will sell you fake gold bars, coins, rods, bullion, and jewelry based on tungsten.