Threading and queue experiment

Question

I'm just beginning to get the idea of queue and threading.

I would welcome input on this exercise script:

from threading import Thread as T
from Queue import Queue as Q
from random import randint as R
import time
'''
Silly script exploring simple use of threadding.Thread and Queue.Queue
'''
q = Q()
now = time.time()
def one_up(queue):
 while time.time() - now <= 20:
 other_num = queue.get()
 big_num = 5*other_num
 print(" {}!?!?".format(other_num))
 queue.put(big_num)
 print("Oh yea, well I put {} in the queue!".format(big_num))
 time.sleep(1)
 print("{} is a BIG number, man. Wow. Look. We made a pyramid.".format(big_num))
a_num = R(1,10)
q.put(a_num)
print("I put {} in the queue.".format(a_num))
t = T(target=one_up, args=(q,))
t.start()

Which outputs something along the lines of:

 I put 5 in the queue.
 5!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 25 in the queue!
 25!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 125 in the queue!
 125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 625 in the queue!
 625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 3125 in the queue!
 3125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 15625 in the queue!
 15625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 78125 in the queue!
 78125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 390625 in the queue!
 390625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 1953125 in the queue!
 1953125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 9765625 in the queue!
 9765625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 48828125 in the queue!
 48828125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 244140625 in the queue!
 244140625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 1220703125 in the queue!
 1220703125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 6103515625 in the queue!
 6103515625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 30517578125 in the queue!
 30517578125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 152587890625 in the queue!
 152587890625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 762939453125 in the queue!
 762939453125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 3814697265625 in the queue!
 3814697265625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 19073486328125 in the queue!
 19073486328125!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 95367431640625 in the queue!
 95367431640625!?!?
Oh yea, well I put 476837158203125 in the queue!
476837158203125 is a BIG number, man. Wow. Look. We made a pyramid.

• MikeiLL: i can already see that the function should be documented. 'retrieve number from queue and replace it with number*5' or something along those lines.

Answer 1

Single-letter variable names are usually a bad practice, with few exceptions (loop counters, caught exception objects). Importing modules with single-letter names is very silly indeed. So don't do this:

from threading import Thread as T
from Queue import Queue as Q
from random import randint as R

Just stick to good old-fashioned:

from threading import Thread
from Queue import Queue
from random import randint

This is not a very interesting experiment with threading and a Queue. Check out the documentation, it's quite basic but much more interesting, and really using threading and a Queue.

• MikeiLL: The original title actually contained the word newbie, but was edited by admins. Sorry if I got your hopes up that it might be interesting.
• janos: I hope I didn't offend you. I meant "interesting" not as "this is no fun for me get lost" but as "there's not a lot to review in this piece, but look, there's a cool doc about this, check it out you'll like it" ;-)
• MikeiLL: I think my ego did some into play a little bit. I have read through pymotw.com/2/Queue a few times, which offers a slightly more fleshed out version of the example in the Python docs. Learning it has felt like a slow process (pun intended).