On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 07:18:16 -0800, Adam Skutt wrote: [...]
I'm afraid I found most of your post hard to interpret, because you didn't give sufficient context for me to understand it. You refer to "his proposed widget set", but with no clue as to who he is, or what the widget set is, or what essential widgets you continue missing. I can guess "he" is rantingrick, but am not sure -- there's only so much of his time-wasting I can read before reaching for the killfile. Rantingrick believes he is doing us a service by haranguing us incessantly into scratching *his* poorly thought-out itches, regardless of practicality or actual need. But putting that aside, I'd like to comment on a few points: [...] > If the situation isn't > the same on your computer then your application usage is highly unusual > or you don't understand what widgets are used to construct your > applications. You've just told me that Python would no longer be > suitable for constructing the majority of GUI applications on the > planet. No, that does not follow. Unless "he" (I'll assume it is rantingrick) has proposed hunting down and destroying all third-party GUI tool sets, what you've been told is that *one specific* tool set is unsuitable for constructing the majority of GUI apps. [...] > Really, if you believe the case to be otherwise, I truly believe you > aren't paying attention to your own computer(s), or don't understand how > the applications you use are constructed. What's out there isn't > interesting, it's what people use that's interesting, and people tend to > use GUIs that are moderately to highly complicated. Well, true, but people tend to *use* the parts of the GUIs that are simple and basic. Not only do the big complicated apps get all the press even when they are actually a niche product (everyone knows about Photoshop, but more people use MS Paint) but it's a truism that most people use something like 20% of the functionality of big, complicated GUI apps. Most people use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice for little more than text editing with formatting. It's easy for power users to overestimate how much of their complicated GUIs are actually used by the average user. Or even the *above* average user. I suspect that a variation of Zipf's Law probably holds for GUI complexity -- if you rank the widgets in order of most to least commonly used, I expect that you'll see actual use drop away rapidly and at an accelerated rate. E.g. the widget in second place might be used roughly half as often as the widget in first place place, the widget in third place one third as often, the widget in fourth place one quarter as often, and so forth. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
