Is Tcl/Tk Dying Out?

http://www.markroseman.com/tcl/dyingout.html

by bch • 11 years ago

3 2 11 years ago

I would like to see Tk/Tcl get more attention. I've been working with it in Python (tkinter module), and it's actually really nice. The fact that tkinter is part of the standard library is what drew me to it initially, and after using it for a couple of cross-platform applications, I see no reason to mess with QT or GTK dependencies.

I wrote a GUI application about a week ago in just a couple of days, under 200 lines of code including the GUI and backend logic. Since it's Python, it 'just works' in both Windows and Linux. Using the ttk widgets, the interface looks native wherever it's run.

Python's built-in IDE, IDLE, is written with tkinter. It's not feature-packed like the big name IDE's out there, but it works and looks decent enough nonetheless.

I wouldn't want to learn GUI programming with Tcl/Tk (again), but now that I have, it's quite easy to get what I want done with it and quickly.

bch• 11 years ago

For reference:

Jeff - Jeff Hobbs, aka Tcl Guy, currently CTO and VP, Engineering at ActiveState (http://www.activestate.com/company/management)

Larry Virden - a well-respected Tcl community member (http://wiki.tcl.tk/16)

Richard Suchenwirth - Dev Engineer at Siemens Postal Automation -- famous in Tcl community for coming up w/ seemingly infinate brilliant small solutions and demos (http://wiki.tcl.tk/496) and happens to be a voracious consumer of cinema

Dave Welton - our own @davidw, a recovering Tcl'er (http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-...)

Jean-Claude Wippler - prodigious developer, respected community member (http://wiki.tcl.tk/10)

Richard Hipp - Tcl Core Team emeratus, SQLite (http://www.sqlite.org), fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org), among other things

Larry McVoy - ex Sun, Google (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McVoy), of lmbench (http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/) and bitkeeper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper) fame, among other things...

Gerald Lester - respected developer/community member, Tcl Board of Directors.

John - John Ousterhout: Brilliant thinker/developer (http://www.highlyscalablesystems.com/3525/favorite-sayings-b...) who brought us Tcl, log structured filesystems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_file_system), great articles on event-oriented programming ([pdf] http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf) and testing/life-cycle-management (http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php), as well as the raft consensus protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_%28computer_science%29).

Is Tcl/Tk Dying Out?

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