How to get started in GUI Programming?

[Kay Schluehr]

peter.mosley at talk21.com wrote:
> I am trying to learn GUI programming in Python, but have to confess I
> am finding it difficult.

Don't do it if you can prevent it.

GUI - toolkits are very complex beasts and at least to me a source of
pain far more as a joy. Python cannot help you making them
significantly simpler but on the contrary add just another level of
indirection. Python normally shines when you have to glue libraries
together or programming simply Python scripts for a broad range of
purposes but if the wrapped library publishes a huge interface with
hundreds of classes and thousands of methods and attributes the benfit
of Pythons abstraction converges to zero. Python does not offer a good
toolchain to take up with Swing, WinForms or Qt to name just a few
delivered with IDEs that are very helpfull in developing GUI apps. Not
to talk about documentation...

Conclusion: if you are already familiar with BASIC I would just
continue writing BASIC apps using VisualBasic dotNet, Windows Forms as
the underlying GUI toolktit and VisualStudio as IDE. Forget the
coolness factor of the language. Cool people never care a lot what
other people think. If you finally want to glue assemblys/controls
together in Python this is still possible with IronPython or
Python-dotNet ( which is a CPython binding to the CLR, available at
Zope.org ).