Tkinter: Joking?

[Steven Howe]

On 01/16/2011 10:46 PM, Octavian Rasnita wrote:
> From: "Steven D'Aprano" <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info>
> Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 1:04 AM
> Subject: Re: Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!
> ....
>> 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.
>
>
>
> True, but the most important thing is that those apps need to work and 
> these days the portability of programs is also important for making 
> them available to as many people as possible.
>
> wxWIDGETS are portable and also pretty accessible for those who need 
> to use screen readers which is not the case of purely native widgets 
> as the Win32 GUI standard controls or the libraries like Tk, GTK or QT.
>
> Octavian
>
If you are making a product, you want it to be unique and inaccessible 
to other companies/products. Hence 'propriety'. It's part of that 
'capture the market' mindset that engineers and programmers have a 
problem with. Fight or flight, you have to deal with it.

So ...

Target your market. Design your software in the Model-View-Controller 
format. It becomes easy to configure you frontend, your GUI, your web 
page, if your code is written to separate the work from the glitz.

Car companies know this. There is the body design crew, and the 
engineers that make it work. So software products too. Artists always 
come first; with good reason, their work catches the eye; remember what 
Dr. Lecter said "Don't your eyes seek out what you want Clares?". 
Fighting that fact, for 'efficiency' is just tilting at windmills (or 
Pontiac Aztec).

Instead, think 'optimal' i.e. maximum usage per market. MVC makes that 
approach reasonable in the first market. Easy in the second (Apple), 
third (Linux) and fourth (BSD).

In the mean time, quit bad mouthing works like Tk/Tcl that have come 
before the current crop. Their successors too shall pass.

Oh, and if your interested, I'm in the third market, been here since 
1992. Time and Tide Microsoft, Apple. Time and tide.

Steven