On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 5:37 AM, Dietmar Schwertberger <maill...@schwertberger.de> wrote: > Chris Angelico wrote (in two posts): > >> There was a time when that was a highly advertisable feature - "build >> XYZ applications without writing a single line of code!". I've seen it >> in database front-end builders as well as GUI tools, same thing. But >> those sorts of tools tend not to be what experts want to use. You end >> up having to un-learn the "easy way" before you learn the "hard way" >> that lets you do everything. > This time is not over. > Especially when you look at data acquisition and control applications > where tools like Labview are widely used. > Personally, I would not want to use such tools as I find it quite > complicated to implement any logic with a graphical editor. > But when you want to sell an alternative to such tools, then you > should not offer a tool which makes it almost impossible for a > typical engineer to create a simple GUI. > > [chomp lots of other examples - go read 'em in the original post :) ]
Either these people know how to write code, or they don't. If they do, then building a simple GUI shouldn't be beyond them; if they don't know that much code, then anything more than trivial _will_ be beyond them. Here's the window building code from something I just knocked together, with all comments stripped out: object mainwindow=GTK2.Window(GTK2.WindowToplevel); mainwindow->set_title("Timing")->set_default_size(400,300)->signal_connect("destroy",window_destroy); GTK2.HbuttonBox btns=GTK2.HbuttonBox()->set_layout(GTK2.BUTTONBOX_SPREAD); foreach (labels,string lbl) btns->add(buttons[lbl]=button(lbl,mode_change)); mainwindow->add(GTK2.Vbox(0,0) ->add(GTK2.TextView(buffer=GTK2.TextBuffer())->set_size_request(0,0)) ->pack_start(btns,0,0,0))->show_all(); If you're a complete non-programmer, then of course that's an opaque block of text. But to a programmer, it ought to be fairly readable - it says what it does. I'm confident that anyone who's built a GUI should be able to figure out what that's going to create, even if you've never used GTK before. (And yes, it's not Python. Sorry. I don't have a Python example handy.) Modern UI toolkits are generally not that difficult to use. Add just a few convenience functions (you'll see a call to a "button" function in the above code - it creates a GTK2.Button, sets it up, and returns it), and make a nice, well-commented configuration file that just happens to be executed as Python, and you've made it pretty possible for a non-programmer to knock together a GUI. They'll have learned to write code without, perhaps, even realizing it. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list