A large list of harmful stuff related to software development is presented on cat -v. Is Qt harmful? What would be the rationale for considering to Qt harmful? Why would Tcl/Tk be presented as a superior alternative?
Why would Qt be considered harmful?
gui;qt
That site is designed around the idea of simple implementations, rather than simple interfaces. This is referred to on that site as Unix style design vs MIT style design.As such, Qt is considered harmful because it strives to offer as simple an interface as possible, whilst increasing internal complexity. For example, QStrings share memory internally, under some circumstances, when copied. Tell me that's expected behavior and the simplest possible implementation. It's not. It's useful when you are storing large amounts of duplicate data in several QStrings, however, so the developers added that feature. As the maintainer of that website states, not implementing features is hard (paper). Looking at the list of harmful software at http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ shows this is a common pattern: The author prefers software that is simple in implementation, does one thing, and does it well. Whether or not the author is correct in their assumptions about complex software is up to the reader, and many would disagree.Personally, I attempt to remove unnecessary complexity from programs I write when possible. However, in order to write useful software, you, as a programmer, often need to deal with such complexity as a matter of course. Your job, as said programmer, is to add the requested features with a minimal addition of complexity.