[Edu-sig] Migrating to Projects - Was: Low Enrollments -programming as anti-intellectualism

[Kirby Urner]

> I know it may seem that I am talking about an IDE - but even those (at
> least the ones available for Python that I have seen) assume that you 
> already know how to do a project.  So I get overwhelmed.  I want them to 
> work for me - but they just haven't yet.

To some extent I think you *are* talking about an IDE.  What Microsoft has
done for an army of VB programmers is provide tools that let the lone coder
throw together a working GUI app.  Drag and drop widgets from a palette, pop
open property windows and link code snippets to events, write code, build
the project (which the IDE defines), distribute the .exe (with runtime .dll
files).  Mail invoice.  Get paid.

Kevin was very aware of this when he committed to PythonCard -- he often
brings up the lone VBer as who he's targeting with this wx-based framework
(in some ways a façade, or wrapper, around the more complex wxWidgets API).
But PythonCard still isn't drag and drop, when it comes to GUI building.

I'm not a VBer (never learned VB), but I'm used to the same GUI-building
tools from FoxPro.  A lot of commercial apps mimic paper forms in providing
page after page for data entry (maybe in a tabbed format).  Hand-coding
thick client data entry forms is just too tedious and painful.  I won't do
it in Python.  Life is too short.

My two cents:  if you're interested in writing GUI apps, focus on thin
client solutions with a browser front end.  Get used to the idea of some
markup language driving the presentation.  Read up on model-view-controller
(MVC) as a design pattern (lots of web stuff if you don't want to spend for
books).  Get a web server running on your local machine and start serving
your app to yourself.  Add some kind of database to the back end.  Use
Python as your controller.  Then move to a framework (which one?).

[Optional:  Maybe get a book on Ruby on Rails, just to appreciate one
elaborate framework for building frameworks (*not* very XML-invested in this
case).  From my perspective, studying Ruby is a good way to reflect on
Python, less painful than starting at the bottom with Perl (although maybe
when Perl 6 comes out...).]

Keep in mind that most truly large scale apps are (a) written by more than
one person and (b) make use of off-the-shelf components.  Lots of people
pride themselves on having written a robust server-side web app that handles
thousands of requests per day.  But that's not so hard, when Apache and
MySQL already work as advertised.  Add a little PHP and presto, the LAMP
turns on.

Kirby