Everything good about Python except GUI IDE?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 5:13 AM,  <wrong.address.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the 1980s everyone was happy with inputs from the command line on a line editor, but today people expect GUIs with graphics and often even animations.
>
> It is surprising that a language which seems very popular does not have GUI development infrastructure in place these many years after it got into common use.

There IS development infrastructure for building GUIs. It's just that
the best way to build a cross-platform GUI is code, not drag-and-drop.
There are a number of ways to build a GUI in Python (wxPython,
PyGTK/PyGObject, PyQt, Tkinter), and some of those have drag-and-drop
builders, but not all. Even back in the 90s, when "cross-platform"
wasn't a big thing, it was possible to build a window layout using
code instead of the builder, and there were a number of situations
when that was better (I gave the example of a database form; one of my
projects was a generic table editing tool, and what it did was ask the
database for a list of columns, and create label+entry field for each
one - purely under script control).

It's worth noting, too, that the language and the GUI toolkits are
independent (only one of the ones I mentioned is even packaged with
Python, and it's an optional part); and, thanks to code, the GUI
toolkits and GUI builders are also independent. You can pick up a
third-party window builder, and as long as it emits valid Python code,
it'll work.

I've written huge numbers of Python scripts and applications, and I
don't think I've ever built a GUI in Python for anything other than
testing.

ChrisA