This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Ben Last.
Original Post: Interesting Times
Feed Title: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Feed URL: http://benlast.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
As in the Chinese curse; "may you live in interesting times". wxPython is currently going through some, as the migration from 2.4 to 2.5 takes place. I saw the announcement of the new PythonCard pop up on the RSS feed, and thought that this could be just what I've been looking for as a way to play very-rapid-development games for Python apps and indulge Small Daughter.
You see, the company I work for is an ideas company. We think things up. On learning this, Small Daughter disappeared into her room and came out with a drawing of her Toy Idea; not just a conception, but carefully labelled, the function and position of every button clearly thought out, the whole forming a product whose form and function had been conceived together, mutually supporting. Of course, it's in the nature of fathers to see such things in the work of their children, but by God, this was a whole lot better considered that some of the ideas I've heard from adults in my time.
Anyway, what I wanted to do (and still will do, in my Copious Free Time[1]) is to take her image and turn it into a working demo, where she can click on the buttons she drew and have the thing actually appear to work for her. Pythoncard is just the job. Could you hear the "but" approaching in that sentence?
The shiny new Pythoncard requires wxPython 2.5.something. Now, I know that one of my favourite editors, SPE, doesn't yet work with 2.5, but (I reasoned), I can live without that for a while - Boa Constructor does all the Zope editing, including Python scripts, so I may as well work in that. Eventually SPE will catch up and all will be well. So I install wxPython 2.5. Bang. Goodbye Boa Constructor too.
That I can't deal with - I need at least one tabbed, STC-esque, session-saving editor at hand. Usually I have at least five or six files open at any one time; IDLE or PythonWin just don't do it for me anymore. So (I reason again), I'll go to a previous release of Pythoncard, one that's less functional but which works with an older wxPython. Ah. There are no earlier releases on the Pythoncard Sourceforge page.
Do I have any sort of reasoned conclusion here? Well; for one, I should stop reasoning about the most likely combinations of packages; my track record is demonstrably lousy. Two; there's a phenomenon that occurs in open source projects wherein the world starts to look like one of those cartoon-style tourist maps they sell in the USA. You know, the ones that show all the local landmarks in $area large and close up, the rest of the US as spread around further away and reduce the rest of the entire planet to a dim strip on the horizon. A sort of distance-based scaling, presenting one's current point of view as definitive; more importantly, one's current set of installed packages, modules and other related stuff. This isn't a bad thing; it's probably inevitable. The world is too full of variables to try and cope with them all. I notice that more and more of the Python stuff I play with these days sports a note about use of Python 2.3; testing code with a myriad different versions and combinations is a lot of effort, and not nearly as Interesting as pushing forward with new functionality. Testing, for open source, is sometimes seen as something achieved by getting lots of people to use your code. Ho hum. I add "learn to knock up basic wxPython app" to my to-do list and return to the Inbox.
Edit: Andy47 pointed me at the older Pythoncard releases - they're under the file release name "prototype", so I'd assumed that was something else altogether. Ah well, it's being an educational day so far :)
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