gui toolkits: the real story? (Tkinter, PyGTK, etc.)

[Paul Boddie]

On 2 Okt, 22:35, bramble <cadet.bram... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ahh... Ok. Thanks, that explains it. At first, it hadn't ocurred to me
> that anyone would want to provide a GUI toolkit binding along with a
> popular general purpose programming language implementation. Moreover,
> it *really* wouldn't occur to me that they'd also want to provide an
> IDE (as Terry mentions in another reply). But then, I'm looking at
> Python today, in 2007, at a time when Python has multiple high-quality
> GUI toolkit bindings available, and when most editors and IDE's have
> excellent Python support built-in.

Yes, and if you consider the situation about ten or more years ago, it
was rather different from now: Tk had been the most promising open
source cross-platform toolkit for a number of years (Qt wasn't open
source until 1998 and wasn't Free Software until 2000 [1]; Gtk+ was
only just getting started [2]; wxWindows, as it was then - and should
really still be - provided support for different backends, but on UNIX-
like platforms relied on legacy toolkits like Xt and Motif [3]), and
many languages offered Tk bindings in order to show their suitability
for GUI programming. Java was probably the first notable mainstream
language of the day to shun Tk, but even languages/runtimes like Limbo/
Inferno (which wasn't open source back then) provided a Tk-like
interface if not Tk itself, and I think a number of less well-known
languages of a certain age offer Tk bindings just as the standard
CPython distribution does.

> Given that line of reasoning though, it seems odd to me that GvR and
> Co. would still regard shipping those as part of Python proper as a
> requirement for Py3k.

If they aren't broken then there's no need to fix them, even after the
controlled breakage involved in the making of Python 3000. ;-)

Paul

[1] http://trolltech.com/company/about/milestones
    (note the difference between "open source" and the stricter Free
Software criteria)
[2] http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-introduction-history-early-days.html
[3] http://www.wxwidgets.org/about/history.htm