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

[Adam Skutt]

On Jan 17, 11:01 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> I'm afraid that's precisely what I'm arguing you *can't* do -- there's
> nothing reasonable about equating the standard library with the language.
> Some languages don't even have a standard library, or for that matter a
> standard implementation.

And we're not discussing those languages, we're discussing Python,
which has an explicit policy of "batteries included".  As such,
criticism of the standard library is perfectly acceptable under the
name "Python", whether you like it or not.  Besides, it's inevitable
anyway.

> Would you argue that Python is unsuitable for parsing real-world (i.e.
> broken) HTML because Beautiful Soup is not in the standard library? That
> Python is unsuitable for scientific and mathematical processing because
> Scipy and Numpy aren't in the standard library? That you can't do natural
> language processing with Python because NLTK is not in the standard
> library? That you can't do image processing with Python because PIL is a
> third-party library?
>
Out of the box?  Absolutely.  Again, expecting me to explicitly state
that is worthless pedantry, especially when the discussion at hand
proposes modifications to the standard library.  There's no question,
in context, about what my words meant.

> There's no doubt that having a good standard library with a rich toolset
> is a beneficial feature of Python. Python's philosophy of "batteries
> included" has been one of it's strengths. But it would be absurd to claim
> that if a tool isn't in the standard library, the language can't do it.
>
Too bad that isn't what I claimed, nor can what I said be interpreted
as such in any way whatsoever, unless you're a pedantic twit.

> > and since rick's proposal involves regressing the standard library..
>
> If you think I'm supporting Rick's incoherent proposal, you've
> misunderstood me.
>

If you think what I said somehow even implies you support his
proposal, then you need to take a few English courses.

> Nevertheless, you can do good, useful work
> with only a minimal widget set. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth, I
> wrote GUI apps using an *extremely* limited widget set, equivalent to
> window, button, text field, and simple bit-mapped graphics -- no menus,
> no scroll bars, no list boxes, no styled text, and certainly no layout
> widgets. By today's standards, that's even more primitive than the
> average web UI, and yet some of the apps written in it were useful and
> even elegant. (I don't claim credit for the elegant ones, but the ones I
> wrote were at least useful to me.) You can get surprisingly far with only
> simple widgets and a bit of ingenuity. Or at least by lowering your
> expectations. *wink*

And when a time machine warps all back to the 1980s, that argument
might have some merit.  Since you're not Dr. Emmett Brown, I suggest
you refrain from making arguments that predicate themselves on time
travel.

Adam