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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See also [Tcl advocacy].
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[Category Community]