Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Adam Skutt]

On Jan 16, 6:04 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> > If the situation isn't
> > the same on your computer then your application usage is highly unusual
> > or you don't understand what widgets are used to construct your
> > applications.  You've just told me that Python would no longer be
> > suitable for constructing the majority of GUI applications on the
> > planet.
>
> No, that does not follow. Unless "he" (I'll assume it is rantingrick) has
> proposed hunting down and destroying all third-party GUI tool sets, what
> you've been told is that *one specific* tool set is unsuitable for
> constructing the majority of GUI apps.
>

If you're going to expect me to be that pedantic, then pay me the
courtesy of taking the time to find the necessary context.
Nevertheless, it's not the least bit unreasonable to address
deficiencies in the standard library as deficiencies in the language,
like it or not; and since rick's proposal involves regressing the
standard library..

> > Really, if you believe the case to be otherwise, I truly believe you
> > aren't paying attention to your own computer(s), or don't understand how
> > the applications you use are constructed.  What's out there isn't
> > interesting, it's what people use that's interesting, and people tend to
> > use GUIs that are moderately to highly complicated.
>
> Well, true, but people tend to *use* the parts of the GUIs that are
> simple and basic. Not only do the big complicated apps get all the press
> even when they are actually a niche product (everyone knows about
> Photoshop, but more people use MS Paint) but it's a truism that most
> people use something like 20% of the functionality of big, complicated
> GUI apps. Most people use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice for little more
> than text editing with formatting.

First, you can't even build MS Paint from Rick's set / the TkInter set
alone, so you're already way off mark (even ignoring the ribbon in the
latest versions).

Second, relevance?  If I cannot ship the application with only 20% of
the functionality, then your point is meaningless.  Plus, look at my
list more closely: TweetDeck is really little more than a bunch of
listboxes stuck side by side, but we cannot even construct that
without replicating what would be considered standard widgets (mostlu
layout widgets, but still, that's the hardest stuff to get right and
therefore the most important stuff to include).  It is not, from a GUI
L&F perspective, "complicated".  Yet, I still need quite a few widgets
in order to assemble it and make it work.  And many of those widgets
need fairly rich functionality: buttons must support text and images,
listboxes must support embedding more than text, text controls must
support hyperlinks, the various layout panes must support scrollbars,
sizing, and dynamic updates.

> I suspect that a variation of Zipf's Law probably holds for GUI
> complexity -- if you rank the widgets in order of most to least commonly
> used, I expect that you'll see actual use drop away rapidly and at an
> accelerated rate. E.g. the widget in second place might be used roughly
> half as often as the widget in first place place, the widget in third
> place one third as often, the widget in fourth place one quarter as
> often, and so forth.

Perhaps, but the drop off isn't relevant till we approach well over 30
widgets, at least, quite arguably more (since GUI toolkits include
both things that are common, and things that absolutely suck to
program, even if they're not used often).

Adam