GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[geremy condra]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 9:29 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve-REMOVE-THIS at cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:12:05 -0700, geremy condra wrote:
>
>> I didn't argue that Tcl is bad. I argued that a dependency on it is bad
>> for python. Would you argue that Python should ship with Perl and Java
>> because there are best-of-breed tools in those languages and python
>> could leverage that? Of course not.
>
> Surely that depends on the tool, how difficult it would be for Python to
> duplicate the functionality, and how important it is to provide the tool
> as a standard product.

Well, I guess that's where we more or less differ. If I felt like there
were a piece of infrastructure for my language so critical that I
simply had to drag java along to have it, I would seriously question
whether it was worth my time to pursue the project at all.

> In any case, Python doesn't ship with Tcl and Tk. They are dependencies
> *only if you use Tkinter*. It's not compulsory.

<snip>

Tkinter- its not only capable of making terrible-looking UIs, its also
capable of not being there when you need it! This is not a point in
its favor.

> Now, we might argue that the Python standard library "must" have a GUI
> toolkit, in which case it's going to have some non-trivial dependency. I
> don't see why it's so much worse to depend on Tcl/Tk compared to some
> other external toolkit.

I don't argue that. I don't think it or any other GUI toolkit belong in the
stdlib, although if I had to pick one I'm pretty sure Tkinter wouldn't be
it.

> And even if it were undesirable to rely on any external toolkit, I don't
> think it's terribly likely that with the resources available to the PSF
> anyone is going to create Yet Another GUI Toolkit specifically for
> Python. We might agree that, in a perfect world, it would be nice if
> Python had no external dependencies at all (well, apart from the OS of
> course), but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. Not unless you're
> volunteering? :)

Actually, I've had to do pretty much this on two separate occasions,
and its not fun. Part of the reason why I like the idea of a sumo
distribution- you can keep the core trim and low-dependency, while
making sure that platforms where bits are cheap have the goodies
that developers want.

Geremy Condra