Newbie's rant's and question :) (long post)

[Hendy Teguh]

Hello,

first, a little warning, may contain negative comments, this is truly
my humble opinion, please consider it as a curious comments, not
flaming or trolling (there're tendency i read on newsgroup (especially
linux newsgroups), that newbie's opinion are often considered
trolling, especially from diehard fans :P ). And  also since english
is not my native language, please forgive my bad english.

Ok, a little background. i learned some programming language before,
all DOS (QuickBASIC, Pascal and Assembly). But when VB 'boomed', i
stopped programming (i didn't really like the way of visual
programming). Lately i began to use linux and see that python is
widely use in almost everywhere, i started to learn python.

I've been learning python for about 2 or 3 months (not too seriously)
and i've been learning from a lot of online tutorials. So far i have
written 2 serious programs, one that remove certain attributes from
HTML tag, the other one auto-rename all images that a page use into
sequential order. All are done manually (read, parsed, edited and
wrote back). I think i pretty much grabbed the basic of python
language (although sometime still need to look for command reference).

1. I actually has a lot of idea of program that i want to write, but
since the 'basic' python has pretty much limitation in outputing
result (No GUI), so i think it's time for me to learn GUI extension.
After searching around, i finally decided to learn wxPython. I try to
follow the tutorial from the website, but it seemed that the tutorial
is written in mind that we have learned any GUI programming before. I
stopped on the middle of the tutorial since everything looks 'out of
control'. I (guess i) do know what the commands do, most question is
like 'where the heck does this command come from?' which lead to 'if i
want to do this, what should i do?'.

i tried to search for other wxPython tutorial, but it seems a little
scarce. i googled around and found out that many expert always
recommended to look for reference from the demo file and the help
file. So, i try to learn by myself. It took me nearly 30 minutes
'wreck havocing' the demo files and wxWindow reference just to find
the command to refresh the menu (which i've disabled). This is very -
very discouraging for me. Am i doing something wrong here or is this
the correct 'process' of learning GUI programming? I feel like
there're a lot of missing step from the 'basic' python tutorial to
'expert' python tutorial.

2. so far i learned python, i got the impression that python is more
like a scripting language than programming since python rely heavily
on external libraries (i may be biased on this because i also
currently learning Blender 3D which use python as the scripting
language). In other word, somehow python is 'teethless' in doing
something 'powerful' by itself IMHO.

I'm planning to write a simple graphic viewer in paralel learning GUI.
Since python don't support natively jpeg or png (am i right?), do i
need to find library to read those file or should i find the format of
each extension and decode with python by myself? if i can use library,
could anyone guide me where to find supporting library for python? (I
once every tried to google for zip handling library, found only zlib,
seems only handling ZIP compression not the zip file itself).

3. just a curious question, why doesn't python include a basic library
(GUI for example)? the library doesn't necessarily need to be
optimised, just to help introducing the way python work. An example
Pascal language, it included some library to handle graphic mode. Not
very optimised, but it really-really help me a lot in understanding
graphic mode. When i'm good enough and feel that it's very slow, i
could either search for better library or just programmed it myself
(in my case, i made a library from assembly). The point is that it
could really - really help the beginner to learn.


ok, end of my rants here :)

Best regards,


Hendy