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

[Adam Skutt]

On Jan 18, 3:49 am, "Octavian Rasnita" <orasn... at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Adam Skutt" <ask... at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!
>
> On Jan 17, 3:08 pm, "Octavian Rasnita" <orasn... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "Batteries included"?
>
> > Python doesn't follow this policy at all. We can say that maybe PHP
> > follows it, but not Python.
>
> http://lmgtfy.com/?q=python+%22batteries+included%22&l=1
>
> Well, this doesn't mean anything because Perl can also say that includes
> batteries, and PHP can say it also.

It means that Python intentionally endeavorer to include some sort of
rich and useful standard library as part of the language, ergo
criticisms of the language may include criticisms of its library, like
it or not.  I'm not sure what makes you believe Perl or PHP are
relevant here.

> You are perfectly right. Then why favor Tkinter and not WxPython. Why not
> strip the Python package and offer WxPython and Tkinter separately?

As of now? There's no reason to remove what's there already as long as
carrying it as a dependency isn't creating problems for building and
distributing Python.

But I already mentioned an important reason earlier: the dependencies
of Tk are much, much smaller than the dependencies of WxWidgets
(though eventually this may change with the X11 port getting
complete).  Another is that the scope and scale of WxWidgets is
problematic: since it's a cross-platform C++ solution it provides a
lot of things that it needs, but that Pyhton doesn't especially need
or want.  It creates incompatibility issues because you end up with a
bunch of libraries that become useless when writing a GUI. This
problem is minimized with Tk when compared to WxWidgets, and most
other toolkits (certainly all the ones I've ever used).

Adam