Re: Pythonic cross-platform GUI desingers à la Interface Builder (Re: what gui designer is everyone using)

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 3:07 AM, Dietmar Schwertberger
<news at schwertberger.de> wrote:
> None of these were such that I could propagate it as GUI development
> tool for non-programmers / casual users.
> Sure, some are good for designing the GUI, but at the point where
> the user code is to be added, most people would be lost.

There was a time when that was a highly advertisable feature - "build
XYZ applications without writing a single line of code!". I've seen it
in database front-end builders as well as GUI tools, same thing. But
those sorts of tools tend not to be what experts want to use. You end
up having to un-learn the "easy way" before you learn the "hard way"
that lets you do everything.

You refer to "non-programmers" and then point out that they would be
lost trying to add code. That's a natural consequence of not being a
programmer, and of all languages to help someone bridge that gap and
start coding, I would say Python is, if not the absolute best,
certainly up there somewhere. Just as you wouldn't expect a music
authoring program to let someone publish score without knowing how to
compose music, you can't expect a GUI tool to relieve you of the need
to write code.

WYSIWYG UI designers suffer badly from a need to guess _why_ the human
did what s/he did. Build your UI manually, and there's no guesswork -
you explicitly _tell_ the computer what to do and why.

ChrisA