Guietta – Python module to create simple GUIs

In no particular order:

radio buttons still basically unsupported - no way of grouping them.

Add optional astropy units for values, maybe extending the tuple syntax: ('__a__', u.km). More difficult than it seems, because one needs to parse input strings. But very useful in a scientific environment.

'with' syntax still very limited, in particular locals() and globals() refer to the Gui class scope so for example anything imported at the beginning of the script is not available inside the with block.

Unit tests almost completely missing, also I have no idea how to properly test GUI code.

Meta-level: add this list to github :)

> Tkinter always looks a little dated

It doesn't have to, it supports theming and there are even themes that use the native GUI.

e.g. https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/List+of+ttk+Themes (search for “native”)

As a former high-school student who has done many little projects with tkinter at that time, I would recommend against dumping tkinter altogether for several reasons:

- with higher complexity comes higher versatility. I liked how it enabled me to be creative - there are two well-written reference websites for learning it easily despite complexity (and that's important if you want your students to like/learn to read the docs) - the tkinter being shipped with Python meant quite a lot to me

However, the reason I did that many projects is that part of my class wasn't really into programming, so if you think that learning and using this will be significantly easier than tkinter basics, go with it, but I would recommend leaving tkinter at least as an option for "those who want to know more", i.e. students who are considering studying CS.

Well done. Both Guietta and PySimpleGUI surprised me by implementing an Internal DSL for Python. Both leverage Python's List literals to define a GUI grid layout. PySimpleGUI uses nested Lists to define the grid with a .WidgetType() style method used in each slot.

Guietta starts with a Builder Factory method with List literal varargs (one List arg per grid row). Instead of .WidgetType() wrappers, Guietta infers widget type based on List element type and string formatting rules. The resulting column aligned code has the visual look and feel of a grid/table and makes it very readable. The choice of Qt-only seems reasonable.

There is probably a category of DSLs that try to mimic a grid/table layout rather than a natural language DSL (many Ruby style Internal DSLs). This is definitely the style I use for SQL DDL, using a strict grid-like layout for the column constraints and moving the verbose parts (like CHECK constraints) to the table constraints section at the end.

Is including arbitrary Qt widgets doable (whether now or in the future)? A lot of my use cases for PyQt5 revolve around QWebEngineView; would be great to be able to throw that widget into a Guietta layout with the extra buttons and such I'd be using around it.