GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Stephen Hansen]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 4:16 AM, ant <shimbo at uklinux.net> wrote:

> We are talking about the thing that the rest of the world sees as
> Python's biggest missing piece


Citation needed, or its just hyperbole.


> - the thing that
> beginning programmers look for and don't find - a decent, well-
> supported and elegant GUI.
>

Doesn't exist anywhere, in any platform, in any language, in any
environment. The only ones who ever got even slightly close where
proprietary --  Delphi was about the best elegant and simple (and yet,
comprehensive) UI platform I think. Mac's actually have a lot of promise in
UI design and integration, but then the poor newbie has to learn Objective-C
:)

And of course, Visual Studio. You keep saying Visual Basic: meh. These days,
its .NET that's the platform there, not Visual Basic. Or Visual C++.

Given ten years of work, and you might be able to get a system that fulfills
your requirements. I doubt it. You'll need a pretty significant budget, or,
a LOT of VERY motivated volunteers.

And that's sort of the point-- what you're not getting from this thread: its
not that most people fall under your paraphrased POV's of 1-4.

Its that most people fall under, "meh, I don't really care in the end. I got
an opinion, but I don't really care."

I'm content with the status quo.


> And who are the beginning programmers going to turn into?


They'll turn to the same things we do. And have a learning curve: ALL gui
programming is fundamentally slightly painful when you first start it, its
just a fact of life. You suddenly have to start thinking in a different way.
Especially if you want your GUI to actually not-suck, to be cross-platform,
and to be able to grow into an advanced and capable GUI in the future.


> So, to summarise the summary: I reiterate my call. Somebody has to get
> Tkinter out of the distribution and replaced
> by something that - as a minimum - doesn't get slagged off by nearly
> everyone.
>
> It can't be me - I don't have the clout.
>

Nobody has the clout.

Guido may have had the clout to remove tkinter in Python 3.0: that didn't
happen, so maybe in a decade for Python 4k you can propose it again.

But not even Guido has the clout to see a 'decent replacement' gets made.

There is too little motivation. Too few serious and capable people are
interested in the entire idea. Not because they are 'invested' in an
existing platform: but because either they don't do GUI programming at all
(this is NOT that significant of a minority), or because they need a
-complete- and fully-functional GUI (which is a HUGE massive project and
debatably can't be done right-- and which PyQT and wxPython fulfill at least
sorta okay enough for them), or because Tkinter really is good enough for
them or they like it.

You have one thread in a mailing list and from it you're interpreting,
"Everyone hates it". Its simply not true. A lot of people actually use it.
And are quite satisfied with it. It has a 'quick and dirty' quality which
makes it useless for me-- I need polish-- but for some uses, its entirely
suitable.

There is a level of "Reality, meet tkinter-replacement-wanting-people" that
seriously needs to happen.

--S
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