Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <4d337983$0$29983$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com>,
Steven D'Aprano  <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 07:18:16 -0800, Adam Skutt wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>I'm afraid I found most of your post hard to interpret, because you
>didn't give sufficient context for me to understand it. You refer to "his
>proposed widget set", but with no clue as to who he is, or what the
>widget set is, or what essential widgets you continue missing. I can
>guess "he" is rantingrick, but am not sure -- there's only so much of his
>time-wasting I can read before reaching for the killfile. Rantingrick
>believes he is doing us a service by haranguing us incessantly into
>scratching *his* poorly thought-out itches, regardless of practicality or
>actual need.
>
>But putting that aside, I'd like to comment on a few points:
>
>[...]
>> If the situation isn't
>> the same on your computer then your application usage is highly unusual
>> or you don't understand what widgets are used to construct your
>> applications.  You've just told me that Python would no longer be
>> suitable for constructing the majority of GUI applications on the
>> planet.
>
>No, that does not follow. Unless "he" (I'll assume it is rantingrick) has
>proposed hunting down and destroying all third-party GUI tool sets, what
>you've been told is that *one specific* tool set is unsuitable for
>constructing the majority of GUI apps.

Actually it was me. Those guys don't even know how to attribute
or quote.

>[...]
>> Really, if you believe the case to be otherwise, I truly believe you
>> aren't paying attention to your own computer(s), or don't understand how
>> the applications you use are constructed.  What's out there isn't
>> interesting, it's what people use that's interesting, and people tend to
>> use GUIs that are moderately to highly complicated.
>
>Well, true, but people tend to *use* the parts of the GUIs that are
>simple and basic. Not only do the big complicated apps get all the press
>even when they are actually a niche product (everyone knows about
>Photoshop, but more people use MS Paint) but it's a truism that most
>people use something like 20% of the functionality of big, complicated
>GUI apps. Most people use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice for little more
>than text editing with formatting.
>
>It's easy for power users to overestimate how much of their complicated
>GUIs are actually used by the average user. Or even the *above* average
>user.

Or even for the support of other packages, I gave the bluetooth
example. I think the use of Python for e.g. configuration of
packages is quite common.

>
>I suspect that a variation of Zipf's Law probably holds for GUI
>complexity -- if you rank the widgets in order of most to least commonly
>used, I expect that you'll see actual use drop away rapidly and at an
>accelerated rate. E.g. the widget in second place might be used roughly
>half as often as the widget in first place place, the widget in third
>place one third as often, the widget in fourth place one quarter as
>often, and so forth.

That is the point I wanted to make.

>--
>Steven

Groetjes Albert

--
-- 
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert at spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst