Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

I haven't read the article yet, but I do have something to contribute: several years ago I was ay PyCon and saw a talk in which someone mentioned async. I was interested and wanted to learn to use it. But I found there was no documentation at all! The syntax was briefly described, but not the semantics.

I realized, years later, that the (non-)documentation was directed at people who were already familiar with the feature from Javascript. But I hadn't been familiar with it from Javascript and I didn't even know that Javascript had had such a feature.

So that's my tiny contribution to this discussion, one data point: Python's async might have been one unit more popular if it had had any documentation, or even a crossreference to the Javascript documentation.

FWIW Python got async/await before JavaScript did. I believe at the time the main inspiration was C#.

JavaScript was always single-threaded asynchronous, the added async/await keywords were just syntactic sugar. Node.js became popular before it as well, though I found at the time it was difficult to avoid callback hell similar to using libuv directly in C.