David's Computer Stuff Journal: Tag tcl

Dynamic Languages in Desktop Applications

David N. Welton — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:02:00 -0700

Ted Leung talks about the lack of dynamic languages in desktop applications. There's something ironic about that: Ted works for Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems, back in the day, was a big contributor to Tcl and Tk. Despite not being the "in thing", Tcl and Tk are used a lot more than people think. Not so much in the latest and greatest things being built now, due to the (undeservedly) "uncool" reputation, but in lots of products that are still chugging along, earning money and serving their users well, if not noisily so. Interestingly enough, my biggest client here in the Innsbruck area is one of these. They have offices worldwide, make a good living at what they do, and their user interface is mostly in Tk.

New "Jim" Maintainer

David N. Welton — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:46:00 -0700

Tcl is a fairly old language, nearly 20 years old this year. It's also quite widespread, even if it's not as popular as it once was. This means that a lot of things are fairly set in stone, and not likely to change short term. It also means that with time, it has grown quite a bit as a system, and has lots of pieces.

Several years ago, my friend Salvatore "antirez" Sanfilippo set out to create his own version of Tcl, something smaller and more flexible, and under his control so as to avoid being tied down with baggage from the past. The result was Jim, which, according to the web page:

... implements a large subset of Tcl and adds new features like references with garbage collection, closures, built-in Object Oriented Programming system, Functional Programming commands, First class arrays. All this with a binary size of about 85kb (that can be reduced further excluding some non-vital commands, and commands not available in Tcl itself).

which has made it popular with people who need a small scripting language for things like embedded systems.

Unfortunately, Salvatore hasn't had as much time to work on it as he might like, being busy with money making web things (it's tough to make money on programming languages), so it's good to see that he has added Øyvind Harboe as a maintainer to the project in order for it to move forward. Good luck!

Tcl and Tk 8.5 out

David N. Welton — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:57:00 -0800

Actually, they were out a few weeks ago, but I've been on vacation at the in-laws' near Monselice, Italy. The release announcement is here:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.tml

It's worth writing about, because it's been a long time in the making, and contains a number of improvements. Particularly noteworthy in my opinion are 'real' hash tables (dicts), an even better sandbox model (Tcl and Java have the best sandboxes that I know of), and a theme engine for Tk that, in the right hands, significantly improves how it looks.

In the fickle world of language fads, Tcl doesn't get the respect that it should these days. Like anything, it has problems, but what doesn't, when examined up close? It's ironic that for years it has gotten things right like Unicode support, and OS-level threading, that are currently being worked on in Ruby.

Hecl obviously owes a great deal to Tcl, but since it's a new language (more or less necessitated by cell phone limitations), we're free to take a stab at improving things that Tcl doesn't get right.

In any case, Tcl is worth a look if you want to play with something that's fundamentally different from a lot of popular languages, and the core team has put a lot of work into the latest release, so give it a whirl (perhaps using tkcon instead of the readline-less tclsh executable) with an open mind, and see if you don't learn something new.