[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python Newbies

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 13, 2005, at 13:19, Arthur Elsenaar wrote:

>
> On Feb 13, 2005, at 17:01, Troy Rollins wrote:
>
>> Well, I've transitioned between tools like Director, REALbasic, and
>> Revolution, and extremely quickly moved into creating non-trivial
>> applications. With Python, it is far less condusive to "playing" and
>> therefore seems to hold me somewhere around the print "hello world"
>> stage.
>
> I didn't follow this thread from the beginning, but did anyone bring 
> up PythonCard? I also previously used REALbasic and also have some 
> Proce55ing experience. I did struggle to get started with Python, but 
> PythonCard that is based on wxPython got me going. The PythonCard 
> folks have the intention to make Python as easy to use as REALbasic. 
> They aren't there yet, that's for sure, but it is useable.
>
> Another fun project is DrawBot by Just, it's a Proce55ing like program 
> to learn about graphics.

Yeah, DrawBot <http://drawbot.grafitron.com/> is really cool.  It has 
syntax highlighting and a very quick edit/run cycle :)  However, it 
doesn't "scale up" to writing anything but little DrawBot scripts.  
It's a fun learning tool though.

> One of the drawbacks of using wxPython in my experience, was the 
> threading support, something I really had to fight with; message 
> queues? My next try will be PyObjC as it builds on a good application 
> framework, but unfortunately it's not very cross platform friendly. 
> (Does anyone know if Mono will have a Python binding?)

Cocoa is similar to most other things with regard to threading: your 
GUI code should in a single thread (in particular, the main thread).  
You will still need to use message queues (directly or indirectly) for 
communicating between threads.

IronPython runs on Mono, though Boo is probably a better choice because 
it's farther along than IronPython is -- though Boo isn't Python, it's 
probably close enough.  I'm really not sure that Mono's GUI support is 
better than wx or anything else at this point...

-bob