Version 10 of How did you discover TCL/TK

wdb (2006-05-27) Theoretically, I knew of it since the early 90s, and from some freeware CDs of the c't (German journal on computers). Practically, I got to know when starting an application ([L1 ]), where the GUI was a must, and where Tcl/Tk provide better documentation related to Tk than Perl/Tk and Python/Tkinter.

Robert Abitbol (26 May 2006) How did I discover TCL/TK? Through 3 excellent programs:

Will Duquette's wiki editor.
Brian Theado's TKOutline. One of the very few stand-alone outliners on the market and an excellent one at it.
Mark Roseman's ProjectForum.

This has piqued my curiosity. Will gave a link to this site and this is how I learned of this site.

Robert Hicks I was using Perl/Tk to do some stuff and decided to see what the Tcl part of it was.

Bryan Oakley I was heavily into perl and stumbled onto perl/tk (in the perl 3 days, circa 1994). After doing GUIs in Motif, OpenLook and a host of others, Tk was a breath of fresh air. A year later I saw a job ad for a tcl/tk programming gig and talked myself into the job. Perl was great at the time but I don't miss it one bit.

lexfiend I was studying at UC Berkeley (1988-1992) when I first stumbled across Tcl in my perennial search for new languages to fool around with. Even amongst such exotic languages as Smalltalk, FORTH, Perl, Lisp/Scheme and Glish, Tcl was unusual in that it was the only one that made me stop, think, tinker, and muster up enough energy and commitment to create and maintain both

the very first Tcl/Tk FTP Contrib Archive (the Web was non-existent, and even Gopher was almost unknown at the time), and
the first (at least to my knowledge) dynamic loading extension for tclsh, the spiritual ancestor to today's [load].

Alas, both seem to have disappeared completely. If anyone still has a copy of the dynload extension from 1992, please let me know at tee-cee-ell at zero-three-ess-dot-net. It would be nice to review my old code and ROTFLMAO. 8-)

Some folks, knowing my origins, have asked me whether JO and I had ever crossed paths. Well...

Yes, we were in the same department (EECS) though in different capacities.
Yes, I did spend a 'lot of time at Evans Hall, mostly in the labs and lecture halls.
No, I never took any of JO's classes.
No, we never met in the hallways, or the local Subway's, or anyways. (The subs at Togo's were better than those at That Other Place though. 8-)

JHJL Circa 1995 I chanced upon JO's book and saw the light - no more battling with Motif and X-Window toolkits. Programming became simple again :)

dzach Trying to find a voice pitch extractor, I fell on Snack and the Wavesurfer, and this new, "everything is a string" language, TCL.