[Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with "japaneseinput" support

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 10-apr-2006, at 23:21, Kent Quirk wrote:

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ronald Oussoren [mailto:ronaldoussoren at mac.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 4:42 PM
> To: Kent Quirk
> Cc: Dethe Elza; Gábor Farkas; pythonmac-sig at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with  
> "japaneseinput" support
>
> <snip>
>
>>> I get the impression that for those who've used Cocoa and prefer
>>> Python, it's a breath of fresh air...but for those who've not been
>>> swimming in a vat of Cocoa, it's not quite so appetizing.
>
>> And to second Dethe: I'm also a python programmer that likes Cocoa.
>> Heck, I wrote[1] PyObjC because I wanted to use Cocoa from Python.
>
> Which is kinda the point -- you already knew Cocoa and wanted to  
> use it in a different context.

Mhhh, I'll have to do more proofreading before I sent out mail. I  
didn't know Cocoa when I wrote PyObjC, I wrote PyObjC because Cocoa  
seemed to be the best way to write OSX applications at the time  
(which was when OSX 10.0 was bleeding edge) and I prefer to program  
in Python.  I actually learned Objective-C while writing PyObjC.

>
> I don't wish to argue about what's "really" easy or difficult about  
> Cocoa. I was trying to point out that people who don't use Cocoa  
> already, coming at it from Python, find several things about Cocoa  
> to be alien and difficult. And attempting to read and use Cocoa's  
> documentation requires that you already "get" Cocoa, and understand  
> the logic behind such things as two-stage object creation.

Sadly enough that's also true for someone that tries to learn  
Objective-C for wring Ccooa programs. There's not much documentation  
that explains the right programming model for Cocoa applications,  
which means you'll often be stuck in increasingly complex code until  
you stumble across the way the framework designers intended you to  
write your code in the first place and most complexity disappears.

>
> I'm really not disparaging Cocoa at all as a development platform.  
> I'm merely trying to point out the impedance mismatch between it  
> and Python. Sometimes people forget how much they had to learn. For  
> people experienced in Cocoa and already familiar with it, the  
> similarities are far more important than the differences, and  
> PyObjC is a wonderful tool. But for users unfamiliar with Cocoa and  
> possibly unfamiliar with the Mac, the learning curve can be  
> formidable.
>

There's definitely a learning curve, but I don't think it is too  
steep and once you've climbed it you have a very powerfull framework  
to write native applications. I'm still amazed at how close the  
object models of Python and Objective-C/Cocoa are.

Ronald