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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

PyScript seems interesting, but must we have infomercial-level hyperbole at the adversity of the status quo to sell it?

> For example, you cannot write iOS apps with Python. You cannot create an application for Windows—the most popular corporate desktop—with a user interface

You can, in fact, do both of those things with Python. Heck, the latter you can do with the standard library alone.

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It’s a bit ironic that you hyperbolicly accused him of hyperbole. He never says that you can’t do those things, he just says you can’t do them very easily.

What’s hard about tkinter exactly?

Stomaching the feeling of using ’90s-era technology.

I used some tech from the 200 B.C. yesterday when I used scissors to cut some cardboard. I really don't see why a technology's age has anything to do with how good or bad it is to use.

In a world where PyQt is a thing, Tkinter is not even worth learning.

The problem is that packaging a PyQt project is too difficult.

PyQt is GPL/commercial. That’s one big honking reason it can’t be used for a lot of projects.

PySide is more permissive though (LGPL).

You can, and I've done it, but it's an uphill battle.

Interestingly this detail may be wrong, but the status quo is much worse. Packaging Python applications is enormously painful, and they often fail to install (or worse, a runtime error) if you’re not on a mainstream distro. And then there is the performance…

This is the general issue of distributing dynamically linked binaries on Linux and not really due to Python itself.

On Windows you can generate a folder with a bunch of files in it along an .exe that starts your app pretty easily and that'll work in most places just fine and is not excessively large, either.

Pipx might be the easiest way to get your application running on any platform that can run Python without caring about distro/OS specific packaging. And if you don't want to push your package to pypi, you can install with pipx directly from a git repo.

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