python is going to die! =(

[Jeremy Bowers]

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 03:13:18 -0400, Tom Cocagne wrote:
>  Python GUI's are one of those annoying circumstances in which there simply
> isn't a good solution (or, at least, no good solution readily apparent to
> one with my level intellect). For every GUI toolkit you pick there's going
> to be several impressive pros and several apaling cons. 

Note that all the Python wrappers I've tried (which is all the major ones
except FOX (if you count that as major) and I suppose direct use of Win32
(if you count that as a python wrapper)) are fairly thin wrappers around
the toolkits, possibly with some added library code (wxPython), so they
are at the very least easier to use than the toolkit directly, and in some
cases have significant advantages.

In other words, pinning this issue on Python is misguided; it is a
fundamental issue with GUI toolkits *in general*, and there is little
(more) Python can do to fix that.

The reality is that while we've mostly mastered GUIs that are simple
forms, we still haven't found "one ideal solution" for anything much
beyond that. (Assuming there is one, of course, though there is probably
at least a 95% solution waiting for us to converge on it.) You've got
"widgets" and "events" and "data" and "code" and everybody has different
ideas on how to tie those things together, with fundamental advantages and
disadvantages to each approach, even assuming perfect implementations.

For what it is worth, you have this problem in Windows, too, you just
don't percieve it because Windows has a One True Widget set... at least
for a given development environment... and assuming you don't want to
install GTK or QT... well, it's close enough to true that it is
practically true. But that's only an advantage if the widget set works for
you, and so far, it never really has. I've never been able to go more than
an hour without having to work around a Windows bug of some kind due to
the way I use widgets. But I digress....