Best GUI for Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tuesday 28 April 2015 15:32, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> On Monday 27 April 2015 17:22, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>>> This is a problem that won't just "go away". As more SMP blocks get
>>> assigned, more people will start using them, and get frustrated at
>>> your program for not letting them. (And why should an end user need to
>>> know the difference between 😃 and ⍥, that the second one works and
>>> the first doesn't?) Unless you're willing to wait for a Python that
>>> ships Tcl 9, Tkinter is a choice that restricts your end users.
>>
>> I'm not really arguing with you, just giving a slightly difference of
>> emphasis...
>>
>> I don't think that failure to support the SMPs is a deal-breaker.
>> Obviously, if you specifically need some subset of Unicode in the SMPs,
>> say Phoenician, then it may be, but I'm just talking about general use.
>> Given the generally poor support for non-ASCII characters many
>> applications provide, any Unicode support is better than none.
> 
> I agree that it isn't _in itself_ a deal-breaker; it's a choice, but
> most choices restrict you, the programmer. Choosing to use Python
> rather than C restricts what you can do easily (but so would the
> converse choice); choosing to use SQLite3 restricts your ability to
> alter tables; choosing to use PyGTK forces you to include an external
> dependency. But choosing to use Tkinter restricts *your users* to
> BMP-only. That's a consideration that takes a bit more thought to
> evaluate; how bad is it? You can decide on the cost of a UTF-8 string
> type by figuring out how often you need to know about character
> lengths, but how can you know the cost of a UCS-2 font renderer?

On the other hand, you can use something like QT, except that judging from 
claims made by the KDE 4 developers, QT has a bunch of Unicode-related bugs 
which they refuse to fix (the one which keeps biting me is that the 
application will suddenly decide I am typing right-to-left, and everything I 
type shows up in redro gnorw eht. Only restarting the application fixes it.

I don't think that choosing UCS-2 only is any worse than any other 
application feature like "support only jpegs, not every obscure image format 
GIMP supports" or "choose to use floating point maths instead of some 
numeric type with unlimited precision". You are free to make whatever trade-
offs you like, and your users are free to use another application :-)



-- 
Steve