GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[lkcl]

On Jun 6, 10:55 pm, ant <shi... at uklinux.net> wrote:
> On Jun 6, 2:22 pm, ant <shi... at uklinux.net> wrote:> I get the strong feeling that nobody is really happy with the state of
> > Python GUIs.
>
> <snip...>
>
> What an interesting set of responses I got!
> And - even more interesting - how few of them actually seem to think
> there is a problem, let
> alone make any attempt to move the situation forward.
> I appreciate that there are proponents of many different GUIs. I am
> asking that all step back
> from their particular interests and - for example - try to see the
> situation from the viewpoint of
> - say - a Python newbie, or an organisation that is thinking of
> switching from (example only!) Visual Basic.
>
> I obviously didn't make my main point clearly enough; I'll restate it
> with a different emphasis:
> The default GUI shipped with Python is Tkinter.
> Few people seem to like it much. This has several consequences.
> - It has not blossomed, like Python has.
> - There are not hundreds of talented programmers making rapid and
> impressive improvements to it.
> - Books about Python use it in examples (because it IS the default),
> but imply that one should move on.
>
> The result that our hypothetical new recruit has to make a choice for
> the new, big project. Remember that
> GUIs have hundreds (sometimes thousands) of classes, functions and
> constants. Let alone idioms and design
> patterns. That is what I meant by 'Our resources are being
> dissipated'; the effort of learning, remembering
> and relearning a workable subset of these is substantial.
> So it would be good to be able to use One Right Way, not try several
> (as I have - I will admit I didn't try PyQt;
> GUI fatigue was setting in by then).
>
> If we are to make progress, I can see two obvious approaches:
> 1) Improve Tkinter to the point where it is supportable and supported
> by a good fraction of Python programmers
> or
> 2) Drop Tkinter as the default and use something else.
>
> If we choose 2) then we have a new set of possibilities:
> 2a) Use one of the 'major' GUIs, pretty much as is, but presumably
> with a lot more people supporting it if it is the default.
> 2b) Use one of the 'minor' GUIs, and get a lot of people working on it
> to make it really good.
> 2c) Start from scratch. With a project supported by the Community as a
> whole, with the agreed objective of being the default.
>
> None of these is easy. All require strong leadership and great
> committment.
>
> What surprises me is the apparent willingness of the Python community
> to let this issue slide.

 ah - i think... i believe you may be confusing realism with
fatalism.  experienced python developers are also experienced,
specialist c programmers (amongst other things) and experienced
software engineers.  they've been around a while (10+ years).  they
_know_ how much effort is involved in creating a major project such as
a GUI widget set (and you can get a wildly-wrong but nevertheless
useful answer from ohloh.net statistics, by going to http://ohloh.net/p/gtk
for example)

 so, spec'ing it out, we _know_ that to create a decent GUI widget
set, from scratch, in c (to make it fast enough) would be... ye
gods... 50 man-years of effort, minimum?  you _might_ be able to
reduce that by using somebody else's library (libcairo, libpango)
but... just... _why_??

 so this was why i went "f*** that!" and "leveraged" web browser
technology, jumping from virtually nothing (an abandoned python-to-
javascript compiler project) to a world-class GUI toolkit, in under 18
months of _part time_ effort.

> My concern is simple: I think that Python is doomed to remain a minor
> language unless we crack this problem.

 ah. take a look at that chart that keeps cropping up every now and
then: python is _not_ a minor programming language.  most likely due
to django, it's rated about 7th with about ... i think it was 6%
share.  perl is now _under_ 4%!

 so i don't believe there are any concerns there: python has enough
alternate uses other than as a GUI toolkit to keep it going :)

 l.