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

[rantingrick]

On Jan 16, 9:45 pm, Terry Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:

> You called them 'awesome'. I did not expect 'awesomely ugly'.
> Screenshots are the first thing for someone to look at, to see WHAT THE
> APP LOOKS LIKE, and to decide whether one wants to bother to download,
> switch to admin, install, run, and uninstall (and hope that that really
> disinstalls everything). I looked and decided that what I saw (except
> for the Mac example), was too ugly to bother with, at least for now.

Ok, Ok, i concede. The screenshots are horrendous, atrocious, and
utterly reprehensible. I should never had posted a link to such a
horrible example of wx. Trust me wx is much more beautiful than that!

> One of the criticisms against tk has been that it is 'ugly' compared to
> other other guis. Comparing current tk against the screenshots, I saw
> the reverse.

Ok, but read on because i may be able to convince you with some new
screenshots...

> If you think the site is bad, send me a ONE better screenshot, or link
> thereto, of wx on WinXP/Vista/7. I promise to look at it. Then urge
> Robin to update the page.

Ok, try this...

    http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/screenshots/index.php

and this...

    http://www.sensi.org/~ak/pyslsk/pyslsk6.png

and this (wxWidgets)...

    http://www.wxwidgets.org/about/screensh.htm

> If Python developers gave that excuse to not update decade-old examples
> in the doc, you would probably rant about it for a week ;-).

Agreed. These horrible screenshots need to be updated yesterday! Or
just redirect to the wxwidgets screenshots if they are too lazy.

> There are two issues: some interface to wxwidgets, and wxpython as that
> interface or the base therefore.
>
> As to wxpython: for starters, it is written in Python2, not Python3. It
> is owned by Roben Dunn and he has shown no interest that I know of in
> having it in the stdlib. Given what that would mean in terms of loss of
> control of interface, code style, docs, release schedule, repository,
> and so on, I would not either if I had done what he has done.

Agreed. However we NEED Roben Dunn to keep doing what he is doing now.
And we need the people who are investing (maybe wasting) energy on
Tkinter to focus on a small subset of wx for stdlib inclusion. Roben
can keep his BDFL title, and Python can be updated.