GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[geremy condra]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Lie Ryan <lie.1296 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/09/10 01:17, bart.c 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? Why not:
>>
>> (Pyton ->) Tkinter-API -> Xlib ?
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>>> 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.
>
> How about shifting the viewpoint a little bit. Tcl is like regular
> expression engine and the Tk is like the re API.
>
> Much like regex a DSL for matching text, Tcl/Tk is pretty much a DSL for
> creating GUI (anyone knows any real program fully written in
> non-embedded Tcl?).
>
> Nobody complains that python included a regular expression engine in its
> standard distribution; so why complain that python included a Tcl
> expression engine in its standard distribution.

This is a silly argument.

REs are not full programming languages, even from a theoretical point
of view, aMSN is written in Tcl, as wikipedia would have told you, and
having to depend on the tools of another language to get commonly
desired functionality is not a good thing for a programming language.

Geremy Condra