(NB: the article was written in May 2014. There are many comments at the bottom of the page.)<p>&quot;This has been the subject of huge controversy over the years, so Guido Van Rossum, inventor of the language, added a multiprocessing module.&quot;<p>I think that assigns too much agency to van Rossum. PEP 371 describes the justification for bringing pyProcessing into the standard library. The primary developer was Richard Oudkerk, who along with Jesse Noller volunteered to maintain it in the standard library.<p>While it&#x27;s true that van Rossum accepted the PEP (on Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 1:22 PM according to the mailing list), that&#x27;s not quite the same thing as adding it.<p>For that matter, the version control logs point out who originally added the code, in its most literal sense:<p><pre><code>    user:        Benjamin Peterson &lt;benjamin@python.org&gt;
    date:        Wed Jun 11 02:40:25 2008 +0000
    summary:     add the multiprocessing package to fulfill PEP 371</code></pre>