GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 9:34 AM, rantingrick <rantingrick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 10, 3:52 am, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew... at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>
>> Pywin32 does seem to have grown rather haphazardly. Some
>> functionality is wrapped in two different ways in different
>> modules, for no apparently good reason, and some other
>> things are wrapped incompletely or not at all. A well
>> thought out replacement suitable for stdlib inclusion
>> wouldn't go amiss.
>
> You summed up in a most elegant way what i was unable to do earlier.
> But i want to add more...
>
> I think PyWin32, like Tkinter, was another gift we have failed to
> maintain on our end. The great Mark Hammond brought us the much need
> functionality of PyWin32 and even today it has not be seized upon and
> made better by the Python community? Do we expect Mark to just keep
> maintaining and supporting what REALLY should be a stdlib module
> forever?
>
> Like it not (And i'm talking directly to all the Unix hackers here!)
> Win32 is here to stay! You should have realized that years ago! And
> likewise, like it or not, GUI is here to stay. You should have also
> realized that years ago (although we may be supporting web interfaces
> soon...same thing really). If you wish to hide your head in the sand
> and ignore these facts hoping that the "old days" of command line and
> no windows platform will return, well thats not going to happen. The
> rest of us are going to move forward and hope that eventually you will
> see the light and tag along.
>

It probably doesn't have as much staying power as you think. The only
reason that having PyWin32 is a big deal and having PyObj-C, PyGTK, or
PyQT is not is because the operating systems that use the other 3 come
with Python pre-installed. If Microsoft ever decides to pre-install
Python on Windows, it's going to be IronPython, where PyWin32 becomes
a non-issue (unless you really really hate yourself).