Question about development languages

[Anthony Saffer]

Hello Everyone,

I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

Thanks,
Anthony


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[Vincent]

On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 00:47:25 -0800

Post by Anthony Saffer
Hello Everyone,
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

I am in the same boat as you. I know perl and wanted to help with this also
but when I asked the impression I got is they would like the consistancy. So
TK libs, gtk2-perl, etc isn't a dependancy during installation. I tend to agree
now. I guess we have to wait for the python guys to add those tools.

Post by Anthony Saffer
Thanks,
Anthony

Vincent

[Michael K. Johnson]

Post by Vincent

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

I am in the same boat as you. I know perl and wanted to help with this also
but when I asked the impression I got is they would like the consistancy. So
TK libs, gtk2-perl, etc isn't a dependancy during installation. I tend to agree
now. I guess we have to wait for the python guys to add those tools.

Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.

The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.

michaelkjohnson

"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin
http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/

[Eric S. Raymond]

Post by Michael K. Johnson
Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.
The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.

I've had experience with this kind of migration. Agreed on both counts.

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Post by Eric S. Raymond

Post by Michael K. Johnson
Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.
The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.

I've had experience with this kind of migration. Agreed on both counts.

One thing I found about Python is that it's quite easy to write
Python code on the first day, and it's the best choice for GUI
apps. But it's by no means a good replacement for sophisticated
shell scripts. (correct me if I'm wrong).

[Eric S. Raymond]

Post by Behdad Esfahbod
One thing I found about Python is that it's quite easy to write
Python code on the first day, and it's the best choice for GUI
apps. But it's by no means a good replacement for sophisticated
shell scripts. (correct me if I'm wrong).

I'm an expert shell programmer. But since I started using Python, I no
longer use shell for anything with control structure in it. One liners,
yes, but anything more complex seems to me to be more natural as a
Python program. Nothing new about this; Perl fans say the same thing
about Perl.

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Post by Eric S. Raymond

Post by Behdad Esfahbod
One thing I found about Python is that it's quite easy to write
Python code on the first day, and it's the best choice for GUI
apps. But it's by no means a good replacement for sophisticated
shell scripts. (correct me if I'm wrong).

I'm an expert shell programmer.

Needless to say ;)

Post by Eric S. Raymond
But since I started using Python, I no
longer use shell for anything with control structure in it. One liners,
yes, but anything more complex seems to me to be more natural as a
Python program. Nothing new about this; Perl fans say the same thing
about Perl.

Here's my scenario: Am writing something called crs, which uses
cvs and find extensively. I'm writing in Python, but found it
really hard to run cvs and find from there, handling the outputs,
... all the time. I couldn't find any PyCVS module, if you are
going to suggest that.

So do you suggest writing something like /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit in
Python?

behdad

[P***@draigBrady.com]

Post by Behdad Esfahbod

Post by Eric S. Raymond

Post by Behdad Esfahbod
One thing I found about Python is that it's quite easy to write
Python code on the first day, and it's the best choice for GUI
apps. But it's by no means a good replacement for sophisticated
shell scripts. (correct me if I'm wrong).

I'm an expert shell programmer.

Needless to say ;)

Post by Eric S. Raymond
But since I started using Python, I no
longer use shell for anything with control structure in it. One liners,
yes, but anything more complex seems to me to be more natural as a
Python program. Nothing new about this; Perl fans say the same thing
about Perl.

Here's my scenario: Am writing something called crs, which uses
cvs and find extensively. I'm writing in Python, but found it
really hard to run cvs and find from there, handling the outputs,
... all the time. I couldn't find any PyCVS module, if you are
going to suggest that.

I've done essentially this in fslint:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/fslint/

Pádraig.

[Eric S. Raymond]

Post by Behdad Esfahbod
So do you suggest writing something like /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit in
Python?

Hmmm...that might be one of tbe few places I *wouldn't* do it.
There's a design-level question there about reducing boot-time
dependencies that doesn'y apply to normal userland scripts.

[Bill Nottingham]

Post by Behdad Esfahbod
So do you suggest writing something like /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit in
Python?

Not really; this would stand a decent chance of making the bootup
slower, to the best of my knowledge.

Bill

[Jean Francois Martinez]

Humm, ever tried to read a shell script exceeding a few dozens of lines?
Nearly by definition, shell languages are oriented far more toward
interactive use than for even moderately sophisticated programming
tasks (and still more inadequate if the script is not "Use and throw"
but is supposed to be maintained).

Post by Behdad Esfahbod

Post by Eric S. Raymond

Post by Michael K. Johnson
Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.
The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.

I've had experience with this kind of migration. Agreed on both counts.

One thing I found about Python is that it's quite easy to write
Python code on the first day, and it's the best choice for GUI
apps. But it's by no means a good replacement for sophisticated
shell scripts. (correct me if I'm wrong).
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Mike A. Harris]

Post by Jean Francois Martinez
Humm, ever tried to read a shell script exceeding a few dozens
of lines? Nearly by definition, shell languages are oriented far
more toward interactive use than for even moderately
sophisticated programming tasks (and still more inadequate if
the script is not "Use and throw" but is supposed to be
maintained).

That's kindof funny actually... I write shell scripts almost
exclusively for automation and other small short tasks that are
non-interactive. Any task that would have any interactivity at
all, I naturally reach for python, C, or perl roughly in that
order. I almost never ever write interactive shell scripts, as
the syntax is quite obscure compared to python or C.

;o)

[Mike A. Harris]

Post by Eric S. Raymond

Post by Michael K. Johnson
Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.
The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.

I've had experience with this kind of migration. Agreed on both counts.

Speak of the devil. ;o) Didn't notice you were in this thread
prior to my last response. ;o)

Actually, it was both your comments found linked off python.org
and also Yoda's knowledge linked off python.org that convinced
me. The "understand it in 6 months" part in particular.

It made me realize how many times I had written a perl script of
a few pages in length, then tried to modify it a few weeks or
months later. It was worse than trying to understand uncommented
assembler quite often, and it was never what I'd call spaghetti
perl. Perl is just cryptic by nature, whereas python is
hard-to-be-cryptic by nature.

After reading your comments of finally reading the python book
and giving it a shot, then realizing all the benefits, and more
or less switching to python from perl overnight, I decided it had
to be worth spending at least 3-4 days poking around with python
to find out for myself. I don't know any developer who has used
perl, then used python for 4-5 days who prefers perl still.

I do still like perl for quickie one liners, and <= 20-30 line
sed'ish scripting though. regex heavy stuff that is short tends
to be cryptic in any language and perl's just a simpler syntax
for short cryptic junk. Beyond that though, I now reach for
python.

TTYL

[T. E. Pickering]

out of curiosity, how many people out there are using ruby at all? i
was a perl hacker for many years and tried to switch to python, but
even after a couple months python seemed like a slog compared what i
was used to. then one day i picked up a ruby book on a lark and
immediately saw the Light. its syntax, especially for regexps, is
similar enough to perl to be friendly to old perl mongers, but its
support for OO (in fact it's purely OO) and threading is a lot cleaner
and easier to use than python's. i still go back to perl, though,
when i need to munge data because the PDL module provides plotting and
numerical support that's superior to anything yet available for the
other scripting languages.

we've been using ruby pretty heavily at our observatory for various
network tasks and for building guis using the gtk2 bindings at
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/. we find it a lot easier to use
ruby threading to build dynamic GUIs than perl/python plus gtk's
idle/timeout add mechanism. they seem to have done a good job melding
ruby's threading with gtk's so it's been quite stable for us when
handled carefully. it results in more responsive guis, too. i've
been building rpms for ruby-gnome2 for our own use and can clean them
up for contribution to fedora if there's demand..

tim
--
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| T. E. Pickering, Ph.D. | MMT Observatory |
| Assoc. Staff Scientist | 933 N. Cherry Ave. |
| ***@mmto.org | Tucson, AZ 85721 |
| ***@tmomail.com (SMS) | [phone] |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb:
Never use your thumb for a rule.
You'll either hit it with a hammer or get a splinter in it.

[Panu Matilainen]

Post by T. E. Pickering
out of curiosity, how many people out there are using ruby at all? i
was a perl hacker for many years and tried to switch to python, but
even after a couple months python seemed like a slog compared what i
was used to. then one day i picked up a ruby book on a lark and
immediately saw the Light. its syntax, especially for regexps, is

Heh. I've got a "perl head" collague trying to learn python (not really
willingly) and he's having somewhat hard time trying to grasp a language
where everything isn't based on regexps :) Never had any fondness beyond
"have to do it" in regexps myself, python was a nice, safe harbor from
that particular hell for me.

Oh and yes, this is off-topic in the sense I've never tried ruby, after
python the {&%¤}#%$1'ness of the overall look of the language drove me
away, fast.


- Panu -

[Sean Middleditch]

Post by Michael K. Johnson

Post by Vincent

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

I am in the same boat as you. I know perl and wanted to help with this also
but when I asked the impression I got is they would like the consistancy. So
TK libs, gtk2-perl, etc isn't a dependancy during installation. I tend to agree
now. I guess we have to wait for the python guys to add those tools.

Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.

Agreed. I wrote a fully functional networked GUI app in a couple hours
w/ Python and PyGTK the other week, and I've never made a GUI before,
and haven't used Python in *years*. Picking up Python and GTK+ is as
simple as it can possibly get.

Post by Michael K. Johnson
The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.
michaelkjohnson
"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin
http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Brent Fox]

Post by Sean Middleditch
Agreed. I wrote a fully functional networked GUI app in a couple hours
w/ Python and PyGTK the other week, and I've never made a GUI before,
and haven't used Python in *years*. Picking up Python and GTK+ is as
simple as it can possibly get.

For more complicated GUIs, Glade can help you build the interfaces. For
simpler UIs, I do them by hand. But for programs like
redhat-config-kickstart which have tons of widgets, Glade really saves a
lot of time. Creating all that widget code by hand would have been
tedious and would have really increased the line count.

I feel that Python has a great deal of untapped potential. Wrapping a
decent IDE around Python and using something like Glade for the UI
builder would give us an open source equivalent to Visual Basic. It
would provide a rapid application development environment for Windows
developers looking to migrate to Linux.

Maybe Eclipse has something for Python; I'll have to check.


Cheers,
Brent

[Sean Middleditch]

Post by Brent Fox

Post by Sean Middleditch
Agreed. I wrote a fully functional networked GUI app in a couple hours
w/ Python and PyGTK the other week, and I've never made a GUI before,
and haven't used Python in *years*. Picking up Python and GTK+ is as
simple as it can possibly get.

For more complicated GUIs, Glade can help you build the interfaces. For
simpler UIs, I do them by hand. But for programs like
redhat-config-kickstart which have tons of widgets, Glade really saves a
lot of time. Creating all that widget code by hand would have been
tedious and would have really increased the line count.

Definitely. I wouldn't have managed that "couple hours" feat without
Glade. Altho, I probably could've done it a lot quicker still if Glade
had a UI that didn't suck. ~,^

Post by Brent Fox
I feel that Python has a great deal of untapped potential. Wrapping a
decent IDE around Python and using something like Glade for the UI
builder would give us an open source equivalent to Visual Basic. It
would provide a rapid application development environment for Windows
developers looking to migrate to Linux.

There are several decent IDEs for Python already, no? Perhaps building
off of one of those would be a good idea.

Post by Brent Fox
Maybe Eclipse has something for Python; I'll have to check.
Cheers,
Brent
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Daniel S. Reichenbach]

Hi...

Post by Brent Fox
Maybe Eclipse has something for Python; I'll have to check.

Eclipse definitly has something for python. You might want to
try TruStudio. It's a Plugin for Eclipse featuring both Python
and PHP. It's Open Source and has a OSI compliant license.

[1] http://www.xored.com/products.php

Post by Brent Fox
Cheers,
Brent

daniel

[Wil Cooley]

Post by Brent Fox
I feel that Python has a great deal of untapped potential. Wrapping a
decent IDE around Python and using something like Glade for the UI
builder would give us an open source equivalent to Visual Basic.

Except the language wouldn't suck :)

Wil

[Brian Dee]

I've used Python and PyGTK to build some personal little widgets and
stuff, just to learn more about the language(s). But, I've never used
Glade to interface with Python. Anyone know of a good resource to learn
that? I haven't been able to find any Glade/Python tutorials out there
with google. I read through some of the source for
redhat-configure-packages, but I have a hard time learning by reading
other people's code, I'm better with some kind of a reference. I'd also
like to get involved with them more in this project. I read about a
cron/at scheduler idea going around. Is that still out there? Let me
know!! I'd love to "get my feet wet"!!! : )

Post by Brent Fox

Post by Sean Middleditch
Agreed. I wrote a fully functional networked GUI app in a couple hours
w/ Python and PyGTK the other week, and I've never made a GUI before,
and haven't used Python in *years*. Picking up Python and GTK+ is as
simple as it can possibly get.

For more complicated GUIs, Glade can help you build the interfaces. For
simpler UIs, I do them by hand. But for programs like
redhat-config-kickstart which have tons of widgets, Glade really saves a
lot of time. Creating all that widget code by hand would have been
tedious and would have really increased the line count.
I feel that Python has a great deal of untapped potential. Wrapping a
decent IDE around Python and using something like Glade for the UI
builder would give us an open source equivalent to Visual Basic. It
would provide a rapid application development environment for Windows
developers looking to migrate to Linux.
Maybe Eclipse has something for Python; I'll have to check.
Cheers,
Brent
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Sean Middleditch]

Post by Brian Dee
I've used Python and PyGTK to build some personal little widgets and
stuff, just to learn more about the language(s). But, I've never used
Glade to interface with Python. Anyone know of a good resource to
learn that? I haven't been able to find any Glade/Python tutorials out
there with google. I read through some of the source for
redhat-configure-packages, but I have a hard time learning by reading
other people's code, I'm better with some kind of a reference. I'd
also like to get involved with them more in this project. I read about
a cron/at scheduler idea going around. Is that still out there? Let me
know!! I'd love to "get my feet wet"!!! : )

It's dead simple, really. This is probably the wrong list to discuss it
on, tho. Really, all you need to do is something like
widgets = gtk.glade.XML('myproject.glade')
And then you can look up any widget in the system using the ID you
provided in glade, using something like
my_button = widgets.get_widget('my_button')
The my_button var would then be a reference to the actual GTK widget
that you can manipulate just like normal. That's really all there is to
using Glade w/ Python, if you are already familiar w/ PyGTK.

Post by Brian Dee

Post by Brent Fox

Post by Sean Middleditch
Agreed. I wrote a fully functional networked GUI app in a couple hours
w/ Python and PyGTK the other week, and I've never made a GUI before,
and haven't used Python in *years*. Picking up Python and GTK+ is as
simple as it can possibly get.

For more complicated GUIs, Glade can help you build the interfaces. For
simpler UIs, I do them by hand. But for programs like
redhat-config-kickstart which have tons of widgets, Glade really saves a
lot of time. Creating all that widget code by hand would have been
tedious and would have really increased the line count.
I feel that Python has a great deal of untapped potential. Wrapping a
decent IDE around Python and using something like Glade for the UI
builder would give us an open source equivalent to Visual Basic. It
would provide a rapid application development environment for Windows
developers looking to migrate to Linux.
Maybe Eclipse has something for Python; I'll have to check.
Cheers,
Brent
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Brent Fox]

Post by Brian Dee
I've used Python and PyGTK to build some personal little widgets and
stuff, just to learn more about the language(s). But, I've never used
Glade to interface with Python. Anyone know of a good resource to
learn that? I haven't been able to find any Glade/Python tutorials out
there with google. I read through some of the source for
redhat-configure-packages, but I have a hard time learning by reading
other people's code, I'm better with some kind of a reference. I'd
also like to get involved with them more in this project. I read about
a cron/at scheduler idea going around. Is that still out there? Let me
know!! I'd love to "get my feet wet"!!! : )

For a drop-dead simple example of a pygtk program, look at
ftp://people.redhat.com/bfox/sample-glade-program.tar.

Uncompress the tar file and then cd into the template/ directory. Then
run './template.py' to execute the program. template.glade is the XML
file that glade creates. In order to change this UI, open this file
with Glade. mainWindow.py contains the Python code. The
"xml.get_widget()" calls show how to retrieve the GTK widgets from the
XML file so that you can then reference them from inside your Python
code.


Cheers,
Brent

[Mike A. Harris]

Post by Michael K. Johnson

Post by Vincent

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

I am in the same boat as you. I know perl and wanted to help with this also
but when I asked the impression I got is they would like the consistancy. So
TK libs, gtk2-perl, etc isn't a dependancy during installation. I tend to agree
now. I guess we have to wait for the python guys to add those tools.

Hmm, it's my opinion that anyone able to learn Perl would find Python
trivial, but I guess that's just an opinion. My experience, though,
is that I was pretty normal in being able to write maintainable Python
code the first day I started learning it -- I've heard the same from
lots of other people.
The real challenge here is probably not moving from Perl to Python,
but rather moving from Tk to GTK.

Takes a perl programmer about 2-3 days to grasp most aspects of
python, with some python.org sifting, it is pretty easy. Within
a week or two, most normal things are learned easily without
needing a book or other docs other than the web IMHO.

Eric Raymond's comments about python vs. perl convinced me to
learn python.

[Havoc Pennington]

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

Tk is unacceptable, it has to be a modern toolkit. Perl is maybe
acceptable (others may disagree) but my concern would be more with
Perl/GTK bindings, I'm not sure what their status is. The pygtk bindings
do require a fair bit of "babysitting" to keep in a good state.

Havoc

[Michael K. Johnson]

Tk is unacceptable[...]

Let me fill in the missing piece: for config tools in Fedora Core.
Fedora Extras and Alternatives have different requirements.

michaelkjohnson

"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin
http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/

[Julien Olivier]

Post by Havoc Pennington

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

Tk is unacceptable, it has to be a modern toolkit. Perl is maybe
acceptable (others may disagree) but my concern would be more with
Perl/GTK bindings, I'm not sure what their status is. The pygtk bindings
do require a fair bit of "babysitting" to keep in a good state.

What about bash/zenity ? I have never tried to do anything with this
combination though.

Post by Havoc Pennington
Havoc
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[M. Fioretti]

Post by Havoc Pennington

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

Tk is unacceptable, it has to be a modern toolkit.

May I ask why?

Is it for some functional reason or because

it looks better in screenshots
it sounds better when one says it

I'd understand even in tose cases, I'm just curious.

Ciao,
Marco Fioretti

[Jeremy Katz]

Post by M. Fioretti

Post by Havoc Pennington

Post by Anthony Saffer
I was browsing the Fedora website and noticed that the configuration tools
are said to be all Python based with a few PyGTK ones. I don't know Python
at all but am very familiar with Perl and PerlTk. Do the tools HAVE to be
written in Python or are other languages acceptable?

Tk is unacceptable, it has to be a modern toolkit.

May I ask why?
Is it for some functional reason or because
it looks better in screenshots
it sounds better when one says it
I'd understand even in tose cases, I'm just curious.

Short list of reasons to start with
1) Internationalization
2) Accessibility
3) Fitting in with the general look and feel of the rest of the desktop

Cheers,

Jeremy

[M. Fioretti]

Post by Jeremy Katz

Post by M. Fioretti

Post by Havoc Pennington
Tk is unacceptable, it has to be a modern toolkit.

May I ask why?

[snip]

Post by Jeremy Katz
Short list of reasons to start with
1) Internationalization
2) Accessibility

Agreed, these are excellent reasons. Thanks

Marco Fioretti