Foreword
Why Qt? Why do programmers like us choose Qt? Sure, there are the obvious
answers: Qt’s single-source compatibility, its feature richness, its C
++
perfor-
mance, the availability of the source code, its documentation, the high-quality
technical support, and all the other items mentioned in Trolltech’s glossy mar-
keting materials. This is all very well, but it misses the most important point:
Qt is successful because programmers like it.
How come programmers like one technology, but dislike another? Personally, I
believe software engineers enjoy technology that feels right, but dislike every-
thing that doesn’t. How else can we explain that some of the brightest program-
mers need help to program a video recorder, or that most engineers seem to have
trouble operating the company’sphonesystem? Ifor one am perfectly capable of
memorizing sequences of random numbers and commands, but if these are re-
quired to control my answering machine,I’d prefer not to have one. At Trolltech,
our phone system forces us to press the ‘
∗
’ for two seconds before we are allowed
to enter the other person’s extension number. If you forget to do this and start
to enter the extension immediately, you have to dial the entire number again.
Why ‘
∗
’? Why not ‘#’, or ‘1’, or ‘5’, or any of the other 20 keys on the phone? Why
two seconds and not one, or three, or one and a half? Why anything at all? I
find the phone so irritating that I avoid using it whenever I can. Nobody likes
having to do random things, especially when those random things apparently
depend on some equally random context you wish you didn’t have to know about
in the first place.
Programming can be a lot like using our phone system, only worse. And this is
where Qt comes to the rescue. Qt is different. For one thing, Qt makes sense.
And for another, Qt is fun. Qt lets you concentrate on your tasks. When Qt’s
original architects faced a problem, they didn’t just look for a good solution, or
a quick solution, or the simplest solution. They looked for the right solution,
and then they documented it. Granted, they made mistakes,and granted, some
of their design decisions didn’t pass the test of time, but they still got a lot of
things right, and what wasn’t right could and can be corrected. You can see
this by the fact that a system originally designed to bridge Windows 95 and
Unix/Motif now unifies modern desktop systems as diverse as Windows Vista,
Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux, as well as small devices such as mobile phones.
Long before Qt became so popular and so widely used, the dedication of Qt’s
developers to finding the right solutions made Qt special. That dedication is
just as strong today and affects everyone who maintains and develops Qt. For
us, working on Qt is a responsibility and a privilege. We are proud of helping
to make your professional and open source lives easier and more enjoyable.
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