[Python-Dev] Dealing with tone in an email

[David Mertz]

The below is really just making this whole situation worse.

On Sat, May 5, 2018 at 8:22 PM, Ivan Pozdeev via Python-Dev <
python-dev at python.org> wrote:

> As I suspected. This is a classic scenario that is occasionally seen
> anywhere: "everyone is underestimating a problem until a disaster strikes".
> The team's perception of Tkinter is basically: "well, there are slight
> issues, and the docs are lacking, but no big deal."
>
Well, this _is_ a big deal. As in, "with 15+ years of experience, 5+ with
> Python, I failed to produce a working GUI in a week; no-one on the Net,
> regardless of experience, (including Terry) is ever sure how to do things
> right; every online tutorial says: "all the industry-standard and expected
> ways are broken/barred, we have to resort to ugly workarounds to accomplish
> just about anything"" big deal. This is anything but normal, and all the
> more shocking in Python where the opposite is the norm.
>

This is simply objectively wrong, and still rather insulting to the core
developers.

The real-world fact is that many people—including the authors of IDLE,
which is included with Python itself—use Tkinter to develop friendly,
working, GUIs.  Obviously, there *is* a way to make Tkinter work.  I
confess I haven't worked with it for a while, and even when I had, it was
fairly toy apps.  I never saw any terrible problems, but I confess I also
never pushed the edges of it.

It's quite possible, even likely, that some sufficiently complicated GUI
apps are better off eschewing Tkinter and using a different GUI library.
It's also quite possible that the documentation around Tkinter could be
improved to convey more accurate messaging around this (and to convey the
common pattern of "GUI in one thread, workers in other threads."


> And now, a disaster striked. Not knowing this, I've relied on Tkinter with
> very much at stake (my income for the two following months, basically), and
> lost. If that's not a testament just how much damage Tkinter's current
> state actually does, I dunno what is.
>

I've sunk two months each into trying to wrestle quite a large number of
frameworks or libraries to do what I want.  Sometimes I finally made it
work, other times not.  That's the reality of software development.
Sometimes the problems were bugs per se, other times limits of my
understanding.  Often the problems were with extremely widely used and
"solid" libraries (not just in Python, across numerous languages).

There are a few recurring posters here and on python-ideas of whom I roll
my eyes when I see a post is from them... I think most actual core
contributors simply have them on auto-delete filters by now.  I don't know
where the threshold is exactly, but I suspect you're getting close to that
with this post.

Yours, David...


-- 
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food
from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the
uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting
advocates of freedom in prisons.  Intellectual property is
to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
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