The below is really just making this whole situation worse.

On Sat, May 5, 2018 at 8:22 PM, Ivan Pozdeev via Python-Dev <python-dev@python.org> wrote:

As I suspected. This is a classic scenario that is occasionally seen anywhere: "everyone is underestimating a problem until a disaster strikes".
The team's perception of Tkinter is basically: "well, there are slight issues, and the docs are lacking, but no big deal."

Well, this _is_ a big deal. As in, "with 15+ years of experience, 5+ with Python, I failed to produce a working GUI in a week; no-one on the Net, regardless of experience, (including Terry) is ever sure how to do things right; every online tutorial says: "all the industry-standard and expected ways are broken/barred, we have to resort to ugly workarounds to accomplish just about anything"" big deal. This is anything but normal, and all the more shocking in Python where the opposite is the norm.

This is simply objectively wrong, and still rather insulting to the core developers.

The real-world fact is that many people—including the authors of IDLE, which is included with Python itself—use Tkinter to develop friendly, working, GUIs. Obviously, there *is* a way to make Tkinter work. I confess I haven't worked with it for a while, and even when I had, it was fairly toy apps. I never saw any terrible problems, but I confess I also never pushed the edges of it.

It's quite possible, even likely, that some sufficiently complicated GUI apps are better off eschewing Tkinter and using a different GUI library. It's also quite possible that the documentation around Tkinter could be improved to convey more accurate messaging around this (and to convey the common pattern of "GUI in one thread, workers in other threads."

And now, a disaster striked. Not knowing this, I've relied on Tkinter with very much at stake (my income for the two following months, basically), and lost. If that's not a testament just how much damage Tkinter's current state actually does, I dunno what is.

I've sunk two months each into trying to wrestle quite a large number of frameworks or libraries to do what I want. Sometimes I finally made it work, other times not. That's the reality of software development. Sometimes the problems were bugs per se, other times limits of my understanding. Often the problems were with extremely widely used and "solid" libraries (not just in Python, across numerous languages).

There are a few recurring posters here and on python-ideas of whom I roll my eyes when I see a post is from them... I think most actual core contributors simply have them on auto-delete filters by now. I don't know where the threshold is exactly, but I suspect you're getting close to that with this post.

Yours, David...

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