[PyOpenGL-Users] Tutorials and "from foo import *"

[Derakon <de...@gm...>]

I decided it was time to start taking my OpenGL knowledge past the
textured quads I'd needed for my 2D work, so I looked up tutorials on
shaders, and found this:

http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/context/tutorials/shader_1.xhtml

Now, regardless of your opinion on how terse or verbose a language
should be, I think we can all agree that clarity is vital for
tutorials. The reader doesn't know what's going on, so the code needs
to be as explicit as possible; otherwise the reader just ends up
confused. Terseness is often an anti-virtue here. So it's a bad sign
when that tutorial leads off by importing * from a bunch of modules.
The problem with importing * is that you then have no idea where a
given symbol comes from. Where did compileShader originate?
glUseProgram? GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER? And so on. The author of the
tutorial presumably knows, and very likely anyone with any experience
with PyOpenGL would also know, but those aren't the target audience
here. The people reading this code will want to be able to adapt it to
their own needs, and that's harder when

So I'd like to request that someone with the appropriate knowledge and
access change all of the imports to either import the specific
components needed (as in "from OpenGL.arrays import vbo" in that
tutorial) or simply import the module and then refer to it by name
("import OpenGLContext; BaseContext =
OpenGLContext.testingcontext.getInteractive()").

And yes, this extends to all of the things under the OpenGL.GL
namespace. Reduction to "import OpenGL.GL as GL" is fine, but some
explicit namespace still needs to be there (or else the "from foo
import specific items" approach). Yes, it'll result in a lot of
silly-looking things like "GL.GL_TRIANGLES", but silly is far better
than obscure when it comes to tutorials.

Otherwise, this looks like it should be a very useful tutorial; my
thanks to whoever wrote it.

-Chris