Simple Communication Between Threads In Python

I've just discovered the threading.Event class, which has the methods set() and is_set() to communicate between threads. There is also a wait(timeout=None) method, which blocks until the flag is set.

import os
import sys
import threading
import time


# this is where the real work is done
def function(duration, e):
    time.sleep(duration)
    # signal to the other thread that we're done
    e.set()


# the thread associated with this function prints out a status message
def status(e):
    # wait for the other thread to tell us when it's done
    print('waiting', end='')
    sys.stdout.flush()
    while not e.is_set():
        time.sleep(1)
        print('.', end='')
        sys.stdout.flush()
    print('\r', end='')
    print('done'.ljust(100))


def main():
    duration = int(sys.argv[1])
    # the event object has a flag that may be monitored by other threads for synchronisation
    e = threading.Event()
    t1 = threading.Thread(target=function, args=(duration, e,))
    t2 = threading.Thread(target=status, args=(e,))
    t2.start()  # start the status thread first
    t1.start()
    t1.join() # join the work thread first
    t2.join() # finally, join the status thread

    return os.EX_OK


if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.exit(main())