What exactly are you criticizing? Windows? (What makes an "inferior OS"?) Java? No, threading is not just a buzzword, and it frankly doesn't matter that threads have gone through many changes through the years. The history of threads demonstrates that they are not the "new kid on the block". So they've evolved over the years; this is not a useful critique. Threads, at least in their contemporary manifestations as in Win32, Java, and ithreads as of Perl 5.6, allow lightweight and highly manageable distibution of resources -- especially when it comes to interpreted languages due to the overhead of the interpreter or virtual machine -- whereas forked processes are more memory intensive and more difficult to work with. The difference between interprocess and intraprocess communication is a big one.

It's just like Java, it never works the same twice

Really? Core Java has been stable since at least 1997. If you want to criticize Java's stability, please look first at Java extensions like Swing, J2EE, or the implementation of (the recently added) anonymous inner classes. And by the way, threads were built into the language from its very inception, in fact one of the revolutionary aspects of Java was the fact that Gosling/Sun realized the usefulness of threads early on and built that capacity into the language for the 1.0 release. Abigail-II, if you're going to slander another programming language, at least make it believable.

Threads mangle each others variables by default, and you need to explicitely guard yourself against that from happening.

The benefit of threading as opposed to forking processes is shared memory space, and that's why Java and threading packages in C++ and Win32 support code that is thread safe. The bottom line is that it's a trade for efficiency in memory usage in exchange for the extra effort it takes to type "sychronized" in your method declarations.

I for one am glad that thread support in Perl is progressing, and that it will be fully realized in Perl 6.