[PyQt] Howto use the Qt documentation successfully - Was: Re: Access to lines of text on textEdit.

[fpp]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 1:25 AM, Peter Milliken
<peter.milliken at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> After reviewing and reflecting on my experiences with PyQt over the last two
> weeks and also considering the implications of some of your comments here
> which relate to a depth of knowledge that isn't immediately obvious to a
> newbie such as myself, I think I will "abandon" my migration to PyQt and Qt
> for the foreseeable future. I think you all do a sterling job in promoting
> and supporting PyQt but at this point of time I think I "deserve" something
> that requires a little less work :-). I have enjoyed my journey and I don't
> regret the time I have spent bouncing around in the PyQt world - perhaps one
> day I might dust off my books and notes and revisit.
> Thanks for the efforts

Again, that is your choice and yours alone.

However, as a fellow newbie, I suggest you might perhaps reconsider
and not stop at the first bump(s) in the road.

Sticking with what you know can be both a short-term gain and a long-term loss.

A (very) amateur programmer myself, I have made such a fundamental
choice many, many years ago in (slowly) learning Python and using it
exclusively, never looking back. I consider that choice a good one,
because Python is one of those rare opportunities of short-term *and*
long-term gain.

Choosing a toolkit to build GUI apps in Python, however, was very far
from such a clear-cut process. Over the years I have tried my hand at
quite a few such frameworks, some "mainstream", some obscure :
wxPython (and the nice but orphaned PyCard), PyGTK, pyGame and whatnot
(with the notable exception of TkInter). I was never able to quite
wrap my mind around any of them, either because of their own
limitations or mine, lack of proper documentation and support tools,
etc.

(Py)Qt is the last one I tried (mostly due to the Nokia happenings),
and it is also the first one that started to make sense to me after a
while. Over the last 12 months it has enabled me to achieve
non-trivial stuff I had previously thought out of my reach. Yes, it
definitely is a huge mouthful at first, it certainly has its warts
too, but it is the most coherent and complete tool I have seen to
date, with comprehensive (if dense :-) documentation, a deep mine of
information on the Web, good support tools, a helpful community, and
enough heavyweights behind it to ensure it will keep evolving for the
foreseeable future.

The main hassle, at the very start, is realizing over and over again
that you have written too much complicated code because you didn't
look well enough first to find the one single line that does what you
need. But that fades away after a while, leaving just the deep
enjoyment (as others have already said) of reading the C++ docs, then
appreciating how much easier it is once translated to Python :-)

Good luck,
fp