[Pythonmac-SIG] coding preference

[Charles Hartman]

I have to say I fall between the two positions. Writing applications 
that have some pedagogical component, as I often do, and finding that 
90% of students can't run it because it runs only on Mac, gets really, 
really tiresome in the long run. (An old tutorial Hypercard stack is 
still waiting for me to find some way to port it, which PythonCard is 
*certainly* not ready to do.) That's what brought me to Python in the 
first place (and to wx in the second).

At the same time, the idea of doing separately tuned developments for 
the GUIs of different platforms is simply out of the question. I don't 
even *have* different platforms (I sneak onto a colleague's machine to 
see if my Windows builds work). Certainly this distinguishes what I 
write from commercial apps; but when you ask me to describe the result 
as "throwaway," I balk.

Charles Hartman


On Jan 23, 2005, at 8:19 AM, Pete wrote:

>> So my point is, you may very well be advocating an approach which 
>> will marginalize the Mac platform even further. I know that's not 
>> your intent, your intent is to see excellent Mac apps get created, 
>> but by eschewing and not helping approaches like the one wxWidgets 
>> takes, and in fact by making the toolkit sound useless for any 
>> practical purpose, you're actually reducing the options that people 
>> have, and in doing so making Mac support a less attractive option or 
>> possibly a simply unfeasible one. Does the Mac platform really win in 
>> the end if you do that?
>>
>> And the shame of it all is that aside from the ambiguous, off-hand 
>> comments ("widgets designed by children", "a really good cross 
>> platform GUI toolkit is not possible") that do little except poke fun 
>> at projects such as wxPython, we get very little constructive 
>> feedback about exactly what needs fixing. But I guess if you blindly 
>> assume it's all "hopeless", then there's little point in that, is 
>> there?
>>
>> Kevin
>
> Personally I have a great application and I don't care about the 
> 'market' - I don't owe them anything, especially the sheepish ones.
> My app' is currently very simple and I am going to continue developing 
> it on the greatest client platform available using the very best 
> tools.  I have now decided that portability in the context of evolving 
> a piece of work is just a distraction. When a better (more productive 
> and elegant) OS than OS X shows up I will jump ship.
> I prefer diversity to homogeneity, any-day. Something like Pythoncard 
> which is now cross-platform was inspired by HyperCard (Mac only) as 
> was the common hypertext browser, I believe. I wish there were more 
> developer-oriented operating systems out there. There is far too much 
> code that needs writing and precious little time. A rich platform can 
> stimulate rich new applications.
>
> Pete
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pythonmac-SIG maillist  -  Pythonmac-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
>
>
Charles Hartman
Professor of English, Poet in Residence
http://cherry.conncoll.edu/cohar
http://villex.blogspot.com