Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 07:18:16 -0800, Adam Skutt wrote:

[...]

I'm afraid I found most of your post hard to interpret, because you 
didn't give sufficient context for me to understand it. You refer to "his 
proposed widget set", but with no clue as to who he is, or what the 
widget set is, or what essential widgets you continue missing. I can 
guess "he" is rantingrick, but am not sure -- there's only so much of his 
time-wasting I can read before reaching for the killfile. Rantingrick 
believes he is doing us a service by haranguing us incessantly into 
scratching *his* poorly thought-out itches, regardless of practicality or 
actual need.

But putting that aside, I'd like to comment on a few points:

[...]
> If the situation isn't
> the same on your computer then your application usage is highly unusual
> or you don't understand what widgets are used to construct your
> applications.  You've just told me that Python would no longer be
> suitable for constructing the majority of GUI applications on the
> planet.

No, that does not follow. Unless "he" (I'll assume it is rantingrick) has 
proposed hunting down and destroying all third-party GUI tool sets, what 
you've been told is that *one specific* tool set is unsuitable for 
constructing the majority of GUI apps.


[...]
> Really, if you believe the case to be otherwise, I truly believe you
> aren't paying attention to your own computer(s), or don't understand how
> the applications you use are constructed.  What's out there isn't
> interesting, it's what people use that's interesting, and people tend to
> use GUIs that are moderately to highly complicated.

Well, true, but people tend to *use* the parts of the GUIs that are 
simple and basic. Not only do the big complicated apps get all the press 
even when they are actually a niche product (everyone knows about 
Photoshop, but more people use MS Paint) but it's a truism that most 
people use something like 20% of the functionality of big, complicated 
GUI apps. Most people use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice for little more 
than text editing with formatting.

It's easy for power users to overestimate how much of their complicated 
GUIs are actually used by the average user. Or even the *above* average 
user.

I suspect that a variation of Zipf's Law probably holds for GUI 
complexity -- if you rank the widgets in order of most to least commonly 
used, I expect that you'll see actual use drop away rapidly and at an 
accelerated rate. E.g. the widget in second place might be used roughly 
half as often as the widget in first place place, the widget in third 
place one third as often, the widget in fourth place one quarter as 
often, and so forth.


-- 
Steven