The Main Thing

With most any endeavour - and software projects in particular - the realisation of one's dreams are largely proportional to how well one plans one's work and then works one's plans. As a friend of mine, Steve Kennerly, once put it to me:

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

This is as true in software engineering as in life. The manageability of a codebase is largely related to how well you insulate sections of your code from each other. If your functions rely on functions that rely on functions that rely on functions that rely on functions, you are left peeling through the code like an onion just to find out which function is responsible for a given aspect of the program. A similar statement could be made about derived classes. As the Zen of Python states:

Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.

With this in mind, the penultimate step in our introductory guide to Python and Tkinter is now posted. Read "The main() Thing" or, if you have missed the beginning of the series, start in the beginning, "A Word on Tkinter and GUI Toolkits."