An assessment of Tkinter and IDLE

[Terry Reedy]

Kevin Walzer wrote:
www.tkdocs.com

[snip]

> and you'll have learned a lot. But I think the TkDocs site is essential, 
> especially in its more advanced discussion of how to put together an 
> attractive, polished user interface with Tk. Tk has a long-standing 
> reputation of being the toolkit of choice for quick, simple, ugly 
> interfaces, and the other resources I've mentioned do nothing to to 
> change this. The practices that Mark Roseman discusses will allow one to 
> eventually put together a UI that matches anything that the other big 
> toolkits (wxPython, PyQt, PyObjC, PyGtk, etc.) can do.
> 
> Hope this helps,

It persuaded me to go and start reading. A couple of things of interest.

"It would be a great help if you could have a look around, provide any 
comments, corrections or suggestions, or even help fill in some of the 
missing pieces. "

so no pretense of completeness yet.

"In the near future, the plan is to continue refining the tutorial, 
mainly finishing up the rest of the Perl and Python examples."

And from the linked blog

"July 09, 2009
Python material in progress.

While not yet complete, I've managed to add a very hefty chunk of Python 
material to the tutorial. I should be able to complete the rest over the 
next week or so. Would definitely appreciate feedback from any 
Pythonistas on the existing material.

While I hadn't used it before, I think Tkinter may very well be the 
nicest interface to Tk next to Tcl's (for which Tk was originally 
designed of course, so you'd expect a bit of an advantage). For people 
unfamiliar with either language, I think Python's more conventional use 
of parentheses for functions, the "option=value" syntax, plus other 
language features it takes advantage of are very attractive and win out 
over Tcl. The two main parts that I think Tcl does in a nicer way are 
event bindings and the fact you can create and geometry manage a widget 
in one statement, while still keeping a handle to a widget around.

UPDATE July 17/2009: Most of the rest of the Python examples and code 
snippets have been added.
"

tjr