这里似乎误解了同步和异步处理之间的区别。
A thread is meant to execute a sub-procedure, most of the times on a "parallel" or "concurrent" fashion (depends on whether the device has multi-processors or not). But, what's the point on concurrency? For the most part, it's about improving performance of a process, by applying the idea of "divide and conquer". Have several threads (sub-processes) executing a "portion" of the whole process simultaneously, and then have a "final" step where all sub-processes results are combined (joined; hence the "join" method).
Of course, in order to achieve such gain on efficiency, the portions that are divided into threads, must be "mutually exclusive" (i.e., they don't share values to be updated... -- known in parallel computing as "critical section" -- ). If there is at least one value that is updated by two or more threads, then one has to wait for the other to "finish" its update, otherwise obtaining inconsistent results (i.e., two persons owning a bank account intend to withdraw certain amount of money in an ATM... if there won't be a proper mechanism that "locks" or "protects" the variable "balance" in both of the ATM devices, withdraws will completely screw-up the final value of the balance, causing obvious serious financial problem to the account owners).
那么，回到并行计算中线程的目的:让所有线程完成各自的部分，并使用“join”使它们“回到”主进程，这样每个单独的结果就会被“合并”成一个全局结果。
例子吗?有很多，但让我们列举几个解释清楚的:
Matrix multiplication: have each thread multiplying a vector of matrix A by the whole second matrix B, to obtain a vector of matrix C. At the end, have all resulting vestors put together to "display" (show) result: matrix C. In this example, although matrix B is used by all threads, no value of it is ever updated or modified (read-only).
Summation, product of an array of massive numbers (an array of thousand of values, whether integer or float). Make threads to execute partial sums/products (say, if you have to sum 10K values, create 5 threads, each with 2K values); then with "join" make them return to the main process and sum individual results of all 5 threads.
Theoretically, the process will do 2000 + 5 steps (2000 simultaneously in 5 threads, plus summation of final 5 sub-totals in the main process). In practice, though, how long do the 5 threads take to do its own 2000 numbers summation is completely variable as different factors get involved here (processor speed, electrical flow, or if it is a web service, network latency, and so on). However, the amount ot time invested would be in the "worst case", the amount of time the "slowest" thread takes, plus the final summation of 5 results step. Also, in practice, a thread that is meant to do 20% of the whole job, unlikely will take much longer than a single sequential process that would do 100% of the job (of course, it also depends on the size of the sample to be processed... the advantage won't be the same on a summation of 10K values, than summation of just 10 values with the same 5 threads... it's non-practicall, not worth it).
Quick sort: We all know in general how quick sort works. However, there's a chance to improve it, if, say, we execute it in TWO threads: one that does the odd numbers and one that does the even ones. Then executes recursively and at some point it joins results of both threads and does a final quick sort in a fashion that will not require so many repetitions as numbers will be sufficiently ordered after the two threads did its initial job. That's a serios gain on performance with a quite big and unordered number of items. Chances are three threads can be used by doing some arrangement to the logic behind it, but its gain is really minimum and not worth to be programmed. However, two threads have a decent performance (time) gain.
因此，在python中使用“join”(或在其他“并发性”语言中使用“join”)具有重要的意义;但这在很大程度上取决于编程理解她/他想要“并行化”什么，以及她/他在将算法分割成需要并行化的正确步骤和需要在主进程中保留哪些步骤方面的熟练程度。这更像是一个“逻辑”思考的问题，而不是编程的“反模式”问题。
