Among the blogs I follow is that of Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Mostly they are interesting but his latest one (IronPython in Action and the Decline of Windows) is a large pile of wtf. Apparently programming windows apps is tedious and gui creation requires many lines of code. Even more surprising to me, web apps are far easier to create.
Wow, apparently he has never heard of delphi, visual studio or any of the other gui editors that have been about since at least the mid 80s. The last time I laid a gui out in code, other than for eductational purposes, would have been about 1986. I have no desire to do it again either.
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4 comments:
He is probably referring to Java or C++ which is the language most non-Windows people know. In both cases the IDEs do suck at building GUIs for a Windows environment.
"Mid 80's" ? Are you sure?
I think you meant mid 90's, although the fundamental point remains valid.
;)
@Anon
Guido was referring to IronPython which, despite being hosted in Visual Studio, doesn't have a visual gui designer. He was then extrapolating from that to how much windows programming sucks in general.
@Jolyon,
I was using a gui designer on the Amiga. That was before I went to university in 87 so mid 80s is accurate.
He's out of touch but for a good reason. He spends all his time writing Python. If he'd ever had a serious need for a GUI application in Windows, Python wouldn't have remained as much of a piece-of-crap as it is, for GUI writing.
Python needed ONE TRUE GUI, and it needed about ten years ago. Now it's too late. The Python world, tiny fragment of the programming world that it represents, is itself further fragmented into a hundred tiny sub-groups when it comes to GUI programming. You've got people using wxWidgets, people using TKINTER, PyQT, and a bazillion other things.
It's all crap, purest crap. And nobody who disagrees with me even knows what I'm saying, unless they've worked with a component based development system like Delphi. You have code, code, code, code, code. Lots of code. No RAD. No decent form designers. No design-time behaviours. No data aware controls. Nothing.
W
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