[SciPy-user] Thoughts on GUI development

[Eric Bruning]

>> In your lightning talk on the interactive shell, you wrote:
>> "What do we gain with GUIs?
>> -Pretty look and feel
>> -Doesn't make you more productive/richer: no economic or academic incentive"

> I guess that was just me being provocative as usual. :).

I'm glad you were! (And I took no offense)

> That said, I would have fully agreed with you a month ago, but I came to
> realize that there is a heavy cost you pay by sitting in a GUI: you now
> have to deal with screen refresh, event-processing, and if your
> calculations are sitting in the same Python process, this slows them
> down.

Are the problems you list specific to integrating an ipython prompt
with a running GUI? I haven't encountered such concurrency issues thus
far. My main struggle has been in getting the user interaction I want
... and that comes back to being able to trap the right event,
reselect data in a timely and flexible way, etc. So maybe I have
encountered what you describe after all.

> So I guess my point is that to pay this price, and still have a
> valuable scientific tools, you need a better incentive than looking
> pretty, you need to be able to solve additional problems, and this come
> with adding additional features.

Agreed!

-Eric