Interactive scripts (back on topic for once) [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Terry Reedy]

On 10/6/2017 8:19 PM, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 05:33 am, Grant Edwards wrote:
> 
>> On 2017-10-06, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>>
>>> The reason a daemon usually opens dummy file descriptors for the 0, 1
>>> and 2 slots is to avoid accidents. Some library might assume the
>>> existence of those file descriptors. For example, I often see GTK print
>>> out diagnositic messages.
>>
>> I run a lot of GTK programs from the command line, and I would say 90%
>> or more of them spew a steady stream of meaningless (to the user)
>> diagnostic messages.  That's pretty sloppy programming if you ask
>> me...
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> If you ever start to doubt that the average quality of software is "crap", try
> running GUI applications from the command line and watch the stream of
> warnings and errors flow by. They range from relatively trivial warnings that
> correctly sized icons are missing, to scary looking warnings about
> uninitialised pointers.

IDLE does not do that because tkinter and the other stdlib modules it 
uses does not do that.  There are occasionally extraneous messages from 
tcl when shutting down.

> Developers: why do you bother to log warnings if you're never going to fix the
> damn things?
> 
> They're probably to busy re-doing working programs from scratch every few
> versions, with a brand new "improved" UI (almost invariably including a kool
> new design that uses light grey text on an ever so slightly lighter grey
> background) and deleting any useful functionality that the lead developer
> personally doesn't use, because "nobody uses that".
> 
> https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Terry Jan Reedy