This is a page for me to outline a 45 minute talk I am giving this summer on Tcl/Tk
Talk Overview
- 45 minutes total
- Sophisticated audience
- Unix users
- Skeptical about Tcl/Tk
Things does great
- GUI
- Event loop (file + GUI)
- Deferred evaluation
- Portability, especially across unices
- Template with subst
Complaints -- some fair, some no longer accurate
- Syntax is weird: non-Algol
- Slow
- Syntax is weird: names/ values versus variables
- GUI's look weird because of motif commitment -- not true anymore
- Visual programming tools.
Demos
- Hello World button, counting buttons
- fifo/ barcode event scanner thing
- tksed
- postgresql over ssh
Possible new niches
- Now there are lots more Unix machines around and they need a visual scripting language
- Makers should be driving their things with Tcl/Tk
- I think Tcl should be developed into a templating language for apache
- Education?
- C programming -- a way to get into C with the easy payoff of scripting.
Challenges
- Deployment
- how is deployment a challenge? Of all the languages on the planet, Tcl is about the only one that has this one nailed because of tclkits, starkits and starpacks.
- Recently it is not shipping on standard installations, like Free Geek's Ubuntu.
- Also, I think the starkits whatever is a little confused still
- Libraries (the community needs a Tcl/Tk library project)
** Skeleton/ recipe for moderately complex (200 line) visual script
- MODEL array
- upvar proc's as callbacks
- traces to update widgets
- fileevents
- vwait
- overall code layout -- commenting style, code sections, etc.
Funny Slides and Images
- I am not a funny presenter, except by mistake.
Notes for using this later
- All user groups need speakers -- hint, hint
- Feel free to update, use, comment on successes and failures, etc
Links
http://opensourcebridge.org/events/2009/proposals/24
http://tcl.projectforum.com/roadmap/Home
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_thread/thread/d6f ...
Fabricio Rocha 08-Apr-09 - Hello, Webb. As you said you would like to have some comments from the community, I would like to suggest you some things. In the "complaints" section, I think that the lack of visual programming tools is a candidate -- even though lots of people think that Tcl/Tk is so simple that it would not need it, those tools are usually expected nowadays (I am actually getting my hands dirty with that, but it's a long way to go). Also, if the "complaints" section is something like myths-to-destroy, maybe you could mention the Tk's Motif trauma which is still so-much spread, and present Ttk as the current answer. And in the "things done great" section it would possibly be good to mention the above-average portability Tcl/Tk provides.
By the way, "granpa might be old, but he can still kick your ass" was great! :)