Joshua Penix wrote: [snip]
I've never understood why the frontends for projects like MythTV are written entirely in C or C++. Any speed benefit in a user-facing UI is generally unnoticeable, yet the developer time hit is likely quite significant.
The MythTV front end is done in C++ because it uses the QT widget set. If you haven't used QT before, it is more like putting Lego's together than the ususal pain of C++ programming, as the QT objects swallow up most of the complexity. Plus the developers know C++.
There is an alternative MythTV front end called Gloss <http://code.google.com/p/gloss-mc/> being developed that uses Python and the Clutter OpenGL framework.
No matter what you use for the front end, you still need a widget set whether it is QT, GTK, FLTK, home grown or something else so you still need an interface to those widgets. The users are only going to care about how it looks and won't care how hard it is to make it look good.
To say that something is developed in Python (or Perl or Tcl or FreePascal or ...) is only part of the development. You need to tie your language of choice to your widget set and then figure out how to do graphical development with that widget set including all its constraints. Some graphical tool kits are easier to work with than others but might be ugly or can't do what you want or don't fit the native look of your system and are therefore rejected by the users.
Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
