here's one more usecase which is probably very common: When you use python as glue to call other programs which can run asynchronously. As an example I've used

here's one more usecase which is probably very common: When you use python as glue to call other programs which can run asynchronously. As an example I've used python once to implement a parallelized genetic algorithm where the evaluation function was a matlab program. It was quite a breeze to spawn hundreds of such threads over ssh using one PC as the controller - if only I hadn't shocked the local sysadmins ;-).