Divecomputer nickname handling..

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Thu Sep 17 18:16:15 PDT 2015


> On Sep 17, 2015, at 5:42 PM, Andrej Prsa <aprsa09 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I would respectfully disagree on several of these points: the GUI is
> not appreciably slower than in C (granted, I only compared gtk and
> pygtk, and have no experience with qt), and any speed loss is
> certainly offset by convenience; the legibility ultimately depends on
> the programmer (and the programmer's affinity to document code) in both
> languages; and C APIs can be wrapped more-or-less easily. Packaging
> might indeed be an issue for windows and osx, I don't know enough to
> comment because I am ignorantly exclusive to linux. I would never
> suggest C or C++ number crunching code to be ported to python, but I
> would advocate for porting the (G)UI into python. Mixing C and python
> (not sure about C++, never tried it) is really not that much of a pain
> once you get used to it. I am an astrophysicist by day and I can tell
> you that most of our field is rapidly migrating all of the UI stuff to
> python. Our own code (phoebe) runs C for number-crunching under the
> hood, but all UI is done in python, and we never regretted the move.
> Your mileage may vary, of course, I just figured I'd ask because, if
> subsurface UI was in python, I'd be much better positioned to
> contribute to the code -- for whatever that's worth.

I appreciate this offer. But while Linus has a mild bias against
C++ that he occasionally voices in his typical soft spoken, understated
manner here, I absolutely detest and hate Python. There will be not a 
single line of Python in Subsurface for as long as I am the maintainer.

We have regrettably one piece of infrastructure that is Python based 
(and I'm very grateful for the contribution, don't get me wrong), but 
the fact that it is completely unmaintainable as far as I am concerned
is one of the reasons while it will fairly soon be replaced by a C++/Qt 
based backend.

So let's cut this discussion short.

No Python. Not now, not ever (as long as I'm the maintainer).

/D


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