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.'' ---- [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 RPN language. ---- [RR]: I think Tcl/Tk's usefulness and appropriateness depends on what you're trying to do with it. Most of the time, I use if for engineering analysis and test data generation. Mostly that relies on Tcl with Tk thrown in to make it easier to give direction. In that case I don't really care how "modern" the windows look. I have used it in part of a delivered application but in that case it was sort of a dispatcher for submitting a batch job; again, modernity wasn't important. That Tcl isn't as popular as Perl, for example, has more to do with cgi scripts than anything else. If you're going for a wide distribution, maybe Tcl/Tk isn't the "right" language (the right language, however, is always the one you speak!). One thing that would enhance Tcl's utility would be a decent translator into some more standard industrial language (C or Java come to mind). I can think of no faster way to test out an algorithm than in Tcl. Then, I could, presto/changeo, turn it into C and stick it in a project in progress. ---- See also [Tcl advocacy]. ---- Anyone see this URL and have comments about it? http://www.kudla.org/raindog/tcl/ [DKF]: Someone ought to show [starkit]s to that guy! [rjk]: I am "that guy." I don't think Starkit was around when I wrote that page a couple years ago.... I never did finish that emulator front end interface, mostly because I don't really use Windows anymore and haven't had as much of a need for crossplatform stuff. My crossplatform goals of late are to get VB forms more or less translatable to Gambas ( http://gambas.sf.net/ ) (sorry, don't know this wiki's markup well enough to link those...) I noticed a number of hits to my tcl page from around here, and so I've browsed through the site a little. I mean no disrespect, but I don't think any of the X-based screenshots on the [Good Looking Tk] page are especially good-looking, or rather, they would have looked great in 1994 but now it's 2003. Performance-wise, I put a program called "Hack-O-Matic" out there on my site around the time I wrote the above article, only to have it reimplemented by someone else recently in a Windows-based BASIC clone called "RapidQ",ten times faster, seemingly easier to develop, and more stable. Tcl/Tk seems more and more stuck in the past to me, and I feel less positively about it these days than I did when I wrote the above article. ---- [Category Community]