BeeWare

The BeeWare project started with a simple question: Why aren't the tools that we use as Python developers improving at the same rate as the rest of the technology we use on a daily basis? Python has proven itself as a highly capable language - approachable for newcomers, but powerful in the hands of experts. Python is rapidly becoming a major part... of the data analysis, scientific computing, and web development landscape. And initiatives like Django Girls have demonstrated that using Python, it is possible to provide a 1-day training courses that introducing people with no programming experience to Python; and at the end of a day, attendees have developed and deployed a database-backed dynamic website, deployed to a publicly visible server. However, the developer experience for someone writing Python sometimes reflects more of the early 90's than the new millennium. The default development environment for Python is still an 80x25 console window. For users who have come from a Windows or Apple environment, where they're used to highly detailed, well designed graphical interfaces, this 30 year flashback can be a completely alien experience. And, yes, there are IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) that provide a native application experience for writing code. But those tools require you to adopt, wholesale, the IDE's way of looking at a project. They often introduce as many headaches to the development process as they solve. And so, we're left with an interesting schism, between the "old way" of Unix development in a console window, and the "new way" of all-in-one IDEs. However, it doesn't have to be that way. The core tenet of the Unix Philosophy is that "each tool does one thing, well". This is a very powerful philosophy, and it enables the composition of extremely powerful toolchains by putting together a suite of extremely focussed, independent tools. Unfortunately, most UNIX tools have convolved this to also mean "all tools must use a console interface". However, there's nothing in the UNIX philosophy ...Read More