GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-06-08, bart.c <bartc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>
> "Grant Edwards" <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote in message 
> news:hullf3$hl4$1 at reader1.panix.com...
>> On 2010-06-08, Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Since Tk already provides a basic GUI toolset, and Python can interface
>>> with it more directly than it can with other toolkits
>>>(PyGui -> PyGtk -> Gtk -> Xlib),
>>
>> Compare that to this:
>>
>> TkInter -> Tcl -> Tk -> Xlib
>
> Is the Tcl intepreter really need to use this GUI?

Technically, no.  But, that's what the maintainers have chosen to do
in order to reduce the amount of work needed.

>  Why not: (Pyton ->) Tkinter-API -> Xlib ?

Because maintain a set of Python bindings for Tk would be a lot more
work.

> Most of the work of designing a GUI is, well, designing it. That's
> already been done for Tkinter so why not just implement the same spec
> in Python (with whatever lower-level code is needed). Then extending
> it should be simpler.

I'm not sure what you're asking.  Are you asking why not develop
Python bindings for the Tk library the way other languages (e.g.
Scheme) did instead of having Tcl as a glue layer?

>
>>> it's not clear to me what is gained by starting from scratch here.
>>> (Is it the presence of the Tcl interpreter? I know Tcl is not to
>>> everyone's taste, but it is an amazing language...)
>
> Some people aren't interested in the amazing language. Only the
> graphics API that goes with it.

Some of us think is a crappy language.  I wrote one small app in Tcl.
When I tried to write something a bit more sophistacated it was quite
clear that Tcl is a glue language, not a real application development
language. I switched to Scheme (which had Tk bindings) and later to
Python.

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