Version 10 of Notes from the 2001 Tcl Conference

Updated 2003-07-19 11:59:41

Drop pointers and tidbits learned at the conference here.

  • At the O'Reilly bookstore, two books - the Tcl/Tk Tools book and the Tcl in a Nutshell book - were on sale.
  • The first days Tcl related tutorials were cancelled due to a lack of attendance.
  • So far, at least 5 or 6 people from the Tcl community have been sighted at the conference - Jeff Hobbs, Andreas Kupries, Larry Virden, Mac Cody, Mark Harrison, and a number of others are expected.
  • Monday evening, Andreas, Larry, Mac, Gerald Lester, Marty Backe, Don Porter, and Volker Hetzer hung out at one of the terminals hoping to find someone around the chat room - but we ended up just chatting face to face... RS Not bad either, but at that time it's very late in central Europe. Please, keep us who don't attend informed on this page!
  • Tuesday the first of the truly Tcl related tutorials began. Steve Ball is doing a great job talking about TclXML - in a bit he will be covering TclDOM. Michael McLennan is next door teaching OO in Tcl, using incr Tcl. The XML class has a dozen or so people - the incr Tcl has probably 2 dozen. There are a few familar faces - Gordon J is taking the OO class, Andreas, Jeff, Randall K (formerly of Neosoft) and Ken (of Avia Tcl training) and I are in the XML class. There are probably a few others I am forgetting to mention here. Karl L is around for instance. In fact, it looks like we may have 10 of the TCT present. AK: Actually we were only eight.
  • At lunch today (Tues) (we're on lunch break right now) there were a couple of people commenting on how the Wiki isn't a good way to convey a lot of info to a lot of people - not enough structure. Apparently they and others find it very difficult to find things here. One person in particular mentioned his difficulting finding things via the search. I know I am still confused on how to find phrases within the body of pages.
  • CL finds this very interesting, as he thinks the Wiki wonderful for searching. Hmmmmm. RS: What's so bad about appending an asterisk to the search phrase? LV says that he hasn't figured out what that means - append an asterisk to the search phrase? CL answers: quick, everyone: go to http://www.purl.org/mini/tcl/2?xml* . 'See how that gets you all Wiki pages which contain the word "XML"? 'See the difference between that and http://www.purl.org/mini/tcl/2?xml ?
  • Ah, but try to find the pages which contain the two words xml and windows ... The ability to narrow down pages, rather than be restricted to doing one word searches, is likely the problem being discussed. RS Anyway, one word searches can be had even shorter, like this: http://www.purl.org/mini/tcl/xml
  • Yesterday (Tues), more of the 'irregulars' of the tcl community appeared - Tom Poindexter, Kevin Kenny, and Reinhard Max are here. We talked Tcl, played pool, listened to what I perceived as a rather annoying talk by Larry Wall (it was done with Larry given 55 secs per powerpoint slide - topic - state of perl 6... and if he went over that he was interupted by a bell/ding, he got quite confused at some places).
  • Today (Weds) is the first day of the Tcl papers track. Festivities begin at 10:45 am with Michael M and Mark H opening the show.
  • After an intro by Mark H, Michael M gave a typical (for him) enthusiastic and entertaining talk on his addiction with Tcl/Tk. I'll (Marty Backe) guess that there's 60-80 people in attendance. I'm taking pictures with my digital camera, so those who couldn't attend can at least view some of the activities. To be posted when I return home.
  • Michael M's morning talk on his addiction to Tcl was, for those of you at one of the previous 3 talks, as entertaining as his game show performances, covering the history of his experiences in Tcl.
  • Other talks today included websh, some work at Lucent with voice recognition, and the KAP application server.
  • Tonite's BoFs covered ActiveTcl current and future plans (Perhaps Mr. tclguy can be convinced to share the slides from this bof and tomorrow's state of Tcl talk?) and the beginnings of discussions by people developing web apps in Tcl. This latter bof ended with an action item of a new mailing list to discuss developing some shared terminology between Tcl web app servers, etc.
  • As Marty said, there's in the neighborhood of 60-80 people. Many of the 'usual suspects' are present - Clif Flynt for example.
  • On Thursday, we had the state of tcl talk from Jeff Hobbs - slides to appear eventually on Tcl Developer Xchange. Some of the talk covered the history of tcl, some covered ActiveState's ActiveTcl binary distribution free for downloading for windows, sparc solaris, and linux. Komodo is a ActiveState product - a super prodebugger to some degree - which will have tcl support soon, but currently supports perl and python as well.
  • The TCT also did a panel, discussing how the TCT and TIPs work, and debating incr tcl in the same distribution as tcl. ActiveTcl ships now with both and more - the TCT sounded as if a two tiered source distribution - one with itcl and itk as sibling directories, the other a 'tiny/squeezed/mini-me' distribution would have only tcl in it; the larger would be portrayed as the standard distribution.
  • Then we had talks on TSIPP Workbench - slick, KitView [L1 ] - soon to be available to people and VERY neat combo of tclkit plus tequila and more - and finally a set of extensions for dealing with 3d visualization.
  • [Friday night] - The eight members of the TCT in attendance agreed to a TIP for bundling [incr Tcl] with the core distribution. http://tcl.activestate.com/cgi-bin/tct/tip/50.html is now in the pipeline.
  • AK: No gameshow from Michael, sorry.
  • As someone who wasn't there, but wished he could have been -- a nagging question: where was JO? - daveg LV: Not present. He is around the net - check out the tclcore mailing list on http://tcl.sf.net/ ... // Thx Larry. It felt like it was too big a coincidence that he just wasn't mentioned. -dg

Marty Backe published a "picture diary" [L2 ].

Steve Landers has some photos at [L3 ].