GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[AD.]

On Jun 7, 10:55 am, ant <shi... at uklinux.net> wrote:
> My concern is simple: I think that Python is doomed to remain a minor
> language unless we crack this problem.

I'm curious why you think fragmented GUI choices is a particular
problem for Python compared to other languages? Or why this is the
main issue holding Python back?

As far as I can tell, most of the other cross platform dynamic open
source languages (eg Perl, Ruby, PHP, Javascript) face the same
problem or don't even include a GUI toolkit. The one exception I can
think of that has a non-fragmented native GUI option is Tcl (which
being Tk is slightly ironic here), but it hasn't stopped Tcl being
doomed to be a much more minor language than Python is.

.NET/C# has had preferred GUI APIs come and go and isn't exactly what
I'd call crossplatform, Java has had (and still does?) multiple
toolkits, C/C++ never included any to begin with.

Objective C has an obvious native GUI choice, but it's not at all
crossplatform and is about as 'minor' a language as Python is anyway.
Legacy VB and Delphi had built in GUIs but they weren't really cross
platform and seem to be slipping out of relevance.

Looking at the state of other languages and their GUI toolkit
landscape, someone might even come to the conclusion that having one
true GUI toolkit is potentially a bad thing for a language.

I don't do any GUI coding so I don't have any toolkit preferences
myself, but I think the only sane way to address your concerns is to
incrementally improve Tkinter. Coming up with a new toolkit from
scratch is insanity, and switching the toolkit to something else
doesn't actually help much (ie you don't think any are currently
suitable anyway) and is just as likely to annoy other people.

--
Cheers
Anton