Help Required for Choosing Programming Language

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Stef Mientki a écrit :
> Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
> 
>> Stef Mientki a écrit :
>>
>>> ifti_crazy at yahoo.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am VB6 programmer and wants to start new programming language but i
>>>> am unable to deciced.
>>>>
>>>> i have read about Python, Ruby and Visual C++. but i want to go
>>>> through with GUI based programming language like VB.net
>>>>
>>>> so will you please guide me which GUI based language has worth with
>>>> complete OOPS Characteristics
>>>
>>>
>>> Although the GUI of Python is not as good as VB,
>>
>>
>> "the GUI of Python" ? What's that ? Python is a *programming 
>> language*, not a GUI toolkit.
> 
> The final goal of programming language is (in most cases)
> meant to create functional things,
> that can assist people to perform their tasks.
> The UI of that resulting thing should be optimal adapted to the final 
> audience (and task).
> My audience is most comfortable with a intuitive GUI.
> In most of my applications,
> I need about 50% of the time for the GUI and 50% for the other 
> functional code.
> These estimates are for Delphi (is about identical as VB, which I used 
> previous).

Stef, I come from the Mac world, at a time where Windows didn't even 
exist. I learned programming on a Mac (by the System7 days), then, a few 
years later, became a professional Windows programmer - using VB, 
VisualC++, etc. My first steps with Python were about GUI apps on 
Windows. I've switched to Linux and web programming since, but I do know 
what Windows GUI programming with Python is.

> For what I've seen until now from Python,
> - designing the GUI will cost me about 2 .. 3 times as much in Python

Bullshit. You don't design the GUI with Python, but with one of the GUI 
designers coming with your GUI toolkit (that's, mostly, wxGlade for 
wxWidgets, Glade for GTK, and QTDesigner for QT). All these tools have 
all the needed features.

> - Python is not capable of doing everything I need
> (almost all interactive actions are very primitive and crashes a lot)

I've shipped some wxPython apps, and tehy were usually more stable than 
the VB ones.

> - designing my other functional code in Python,
> will reduce the development time with an estimated factor of 2
> So the combination of Delphi (or VB) and Python seems the optimal 
> combination for heavily GUI's.

My experience is that you *dont* need Delphi nor VB at all.

> - one of the big problems with Python is the version differences 
> (compatibility)

By itself, Python is very carefully designed for backward compat - 
you'll find that much of the code written by the 1.5.2 days still work 
as is. True, there are some compat requirements wrt/ which version of 
wxPython works with which versions of wxWidgets and Python, but nothing 
unusual here.

> Bruno, I think we've a different audience / target application,
> and at the moment we'll never agree about GUI,

cf above. When I was writing Windows GUI apps, my target audience was 
mostly people knowing how to use a professional app on Windows. Now I'm 
doing web apps, and my target audience may include my own mother - which 
is not specially computer savy (even MacOS is too complex for her...).