Asynchronous programming

Asynchronous programming has gained a lot of traction in the last few years. In Python 3.5, we finally got some syntax features that solidified the concepts of asynchronous execution. But this does not mean that asynchronous programming wasn't possible before Python 3.5. A lot of libraries and frameworks were provided a lot earlier, and most of them have origins in the old versions of Python 2. There is even a whole alternate implementation of Python called Stackless Python that concentrates on this single programming approach.

The easiest way to think about asynchronous programming in Python is to imagine something similar to threads, but without system scheduling involved. This means that an asynchronous program can concurrently process information, but the execution context is switched internally and not by the system scheduler.

But, of course, we don't use threads to concurrently handle the work in an asynchronous program. Many asynchronous...