On Jun 5, 2006, at 9:24 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:
I know I'm not going to write my UIs in code - but I also know I'm not going to give up the strengths of the various tools I've developed expertise in without an almighty struggle.
I'm glad that Norman Winn posted his message; he summed up exactly what I was going to say to you. Just as you're reluctant to give up your tools, there are many, many more folks out there who are reluctant to give up their GUI development tools. I'll guarantee that if you take a Visual Studio developer and show him how great it is to develop GUIs in Python, he'll be shocked that you're using text files to create GUIs. He'll then go and tell all his MSFT buddies that Python sucks.
I know this sounds grandiose, but our eventual goal is to be the Visual Studio of the Python world. We want to make it as easy to create GUI applications in Python as it is in any proprietary language. We chose wxPython as our initial UI toolkit because it looked the best on every platform out there. Its API sucks, though, at least from a Python POV: it's too much like C++, with getters/ setters and those god-awful wx.UPPER_CASE_CONSTANTS_WITH_LOTS_OF_UNDERSCORES. That's why we created our own API: not because wxPython was too hard for us; hell, wrapping an API is much more difficult than using it! ;-) But because we want to make it easy for everyone to use Dabo's UI. E.g., if I want to set the upper position of a control, it makes sense to use a syntax like control.Top = 33; the wxPython method is pretty ugly. Now imagine you want to bottom-align a series of controls in wxPython! In Dabo, you just set their Bottom property to the same value, and you're done!
I still use BBEdit to write Dabo; I much prefer that editor over Dabo's. That means that at some point, more work will have to be put into Dabo's editor to add the kinds of things that make life simple in BBEdit. I'm hoping that people who love other editors will be similarly inspired to contribute features that will make Dabo's editor work better for them.
-- Ed Leafe -- http://leafe.com -- http://dabodev.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/dabo-users
