[Baypiggies] Python 3 and the GUI - opinions wanted

[Bill Janssen]

Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 22, 2014, Dirk Bergstrom wrote:
> > On 04/22/2014 10:12 AM, Martin Falatic wrote:
> >>
> >>When it comes to creating a modern GUI-based, cross-platform application
> >>in Linux/Mac and Windows using Python (and taking Python 3 into
> >>consideration, with Python 2.7 as a backport path) what's is the best
> >>direction to go in? Tkinter, PySide (Qt), others?
> > 
> > Consider using the browser as your UI toolkit.  Build a "web app" that
> > listens on localhost, and you get access to a huge variety of UI tools and
> > libraries, an enormous developer community and great debugging tools.  It
> > also greatly reduces the number of dependencies you need to install, since
> > every user already has a browser, whereas basically nobody has your
> > particular version of Qt/Tk/GTK pre-installed.
> 
> OTOH, you are then not developing in Python anymore.  ;-)

Dang straight.  I'm sitting here gluing a ECMAscript/CSS/XHTML/SVG
front-end to a CommonLisp back-end, and it's not pleasant.

See https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf for some
useful comparisons:

``...a Web page is now like V'Ger from the first "Star Trek" movie, a
piece of technology that we once understood but can no longer fathom, a
thrashing leviathan of code and markup written by people so
untrustworthy that they're not even third parties, they're fifth parties
who weren't even INVITED to the party, but who showed up anyways because
the hippies got it right and free love or whatever.''

``But, on the bright side, things could always be worse. For example, it
would definitely be horrible if your browser's scripting language
combined the prototype-based inheritance of Self, a quasi-functional
aspect borrowed from LISP, a structured syntax adapted from C, and an
aggressively asynchronous I/O model that requires elaborate callback
chains that span multiple generations of hard-working Americans. OH NO
I'VE JUST DESCRIBED JAVASCRIPT. What an unpleasant turn of events!
People were begging for a combination of Self, LISP, and C in the same
way that the denizens of Middle Earth were begging Saruman to breed Orcs
and men to make Uruk-hai.''

Bill