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++ performance, the availability of the source code, its documentation, the high-quality technical support, and all the other items mentioned in Trolltech's glossy marketing 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 everything that doesn't. How else can we explain that some of the brightest programmers need help to program a video recorder, or that most engineers seem to have trouble operating the company's phone system? I for one am perfectly capable of memorizing sequences of random numbers and commands, but if these are required 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.
