[SciPy-user] Thoughts on GUI development

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 11:15:00AM -0400, Eric Bruning wrote:
> In your lightning talk on the interactive shell, you wrote:
> "What do we gain with GUIs?
> -Pretty look and feel
> -Doesn't make you more productive/richer: no economic or academic incentive"

I guess that was just me being provocative as usual. :).

That said, I would have fully agreed with you a month ago, but I came to
realize that there is a heavy cost you pay by sitting in a GUI: you now
have to deal with screen refresh, event-processing, and if your
calculations are sitting in the same Python process, this slows them
down. So I guess my point is that to pay this price, and still have a
valuable scientific tools, you need a better incentive than looking
pretty, you need to be able to solve additional problems, and this come
with adding additional features. 

Gaël