August 01, 2003 - Tcl's popularity is deemed low in [Icon] and many other places. It is often argued that the number of books on Tcl is very small. In Brazil (where I live), there only seems to be one book about Tcl, and it's one of the "pocket reference" type, by a publisher that seems to be willing to publish "pocket reference" books on just about anything computer related. A couple of geeky magazines published here discuss a lot about programming, and I only saw Tcl/Tk mentioned once in the cover, unlike other languages.

As I write this, there is a thread going on at [c.l.t.] about how Tk's allegedly ugly widgets put a lot of people off. That [c.l.t.] seems to have been caused by an article at Freshmeat about GUI toolkits, whose author expressely refused to include Tcl/Tk in the round-up because it was not even worth bothering. This thread spawned [Good Looking Tk].

I recall someone once said here that Tcl seems to have caught on very well on Francophone countries (though I suspect he meant more Canada than France). And I wonder:

   * Would you say that Tcl/Tk is popular in your country?

   * Does Tcl have to be popular? Is it good, bad or we shouldn't really care?

   * Why isn't Tcl popular and how could that be changed?

I think that Tcl could become more popular if more people contributed code, doc, applications and extensions. The more functionality a language has, the less someone who has a need has to do to be able to use the language.
There are many more non-programmers than there are programmers.  Non-programmers come looking for [appliance software] and when they find it, they use it.  
They don't care what language is used - they just want the job done.

If people were developing in [perl], or most other languages, and they wanted
some feature that was not there, they would, in general, find things in
the same state as [tcl] - there isn't a body of developers sitting around
sighing and saying
''I sure wish I had something to program - I'm really
bored today.  Doesn't someone need a brand new windowing system?''
Instead, they would likely be told
''Here's the existing source code - start hacking in your solution.''

LSES - ''Of course having more people contributing would be very welcome. But Tcl already has more than enough contribution done to attract a lot of interest. Why doesn't it then, why is it so often scoffed at, is the main question here.''


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[Salvatore Sanfilippo]: In Italy TCL popularity seems not so bad. I write for a Linux magazine here
(called Linux&C http://www.oltrelinux.com, no english) and we are planning to do a number of articles about TCL.
BTW the fact that TCL is not very popular does not means it's a TCL's problem: the mass likes
to code with algol-like not-so-flexible langauges like [PHP], a big part of programmers just don't
understand TCL: because it is much more simple to say it is slow then to make an effort to understand
how it works, it is how it goes. With [Lisp] it is pretty much the same, for the average programmer
it is hard to undestand Lisp, while to say there are too brackets and that isn't good of
real programming tasks is much more simple.
Not to mention stack-based languages like FORTH or Joy: this programming languages are IMHO very
great, it's fantastic how they are able to build great abstractions using few semantics: if you
ask the average programmer, he will tell you that's just crazy to program with an RPL language.
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See also [Tcl advocacy].
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Anyone see this URL and have comments about it?

http://www.kudla.org/raindog/tcl/
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[Category Community]