I think that the Tcl community does not get enough promotion. It took me ages to find out how useful and brilliant Tcl is. I had tried many other languages before, until I heard of Tcl <-- that should IMHO not be the case. I think I should have heard about Tcl a lot earlier. There is simply not enough "marketing" of Tcl going on.
Many brilliant applications are written in Tcl and are open-source. Would it not be an idea to develop a list of these applications and somehow start promoting Tcl through that? Any ideas?
LVwikignome - 2012-01-10 19:46:14
During early days of the community, more promotional work was done. New applications were written and announced, books were written, talks were given at conferences. As time has gone on, most of those doing those types of things have gotten busy with other things. Perhaps if people new to the community stepped into the role, injecting their enthusiasm into the effort of promotional, that would help.
However, how much promotion do you see to get people to write code in Perl (or even Python and Ruby) these days? Or even Java? Very little. Those languages have reached a maturity level that tends to be overlooked by writers, who want to focus on the 10 programming languages you need to learn during 2012 or some such topic. They will generally cover some new language invented by Google, or Microsoft, or Apple, and occasionally a new language designed in academia for research.
They don't generally cover C, Perl, Tcl, BASIC, assembly language, etc.
I think an interesting way to increase the Tcl awareness level of general public would be introducing Tcl to the Modern world of Windows Store. Well, right now Windows 8, OS that uses it, has pretty small usage percentage compared to, say, its previous incarnation, but it /is/ a future of Windows. Besides, one cannot deny its comfort of use in touchscreen-enabled mobile devices that came to compete with home PCs. So, getting TCL-powered apps to Store would expand our horizons even further. That being said, it seems to be easier said then done. Windows 8 Modern Apps use new WindowsRuntime and are subjects of a series of restrictions, so some compromises will most likely be required. Also, thanks to the entirely new Moder UI style, Tk is going to be mostly out of place in such environment, and new set of bindings to native widgets most likely be in order. Still, something "simple", like tclsh-style app would be a good first step. It is not that impossible, after all Python folks made one already.
...Well, we can always cheat and use one of "Tcl in JS" implementations to fake it, using the Win8's native(!) HTML5/JavaScript host with all its pre-exposed system bindings, but I really doubt the efficiency of such matryoshka...