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From: cattaghia on 6 Apr 2010 02:04
David Welton wrote:
> ... the Tk community probably ought to have done more to foster a culture
> of creating good GUIs. If you look at otherwise excellent books, like
> Brent Welch's, you'll find all kinds of details about how to use the Tk
> widgets, but not much material telling the reader how to go about creating
> a "good" GUI.

I have observed this already and I remember to have written about this
(I'm not sure if it was here or in the Tclers wiki). I really miss
something fo Tk in the lines of the famous Gnome Human Interface
Guidelines or the Apple's equivalent. Sure, there's the fundamental
difference that those guides refer to their own desktop environments,
while cross-platform Tk runs on them and other dozens of graphical
environments. But this portability sets another challenge in the
development of good Tk GUIs which remain good when crossing platforms,
and this would be a very important chapter in such a guide. I can not
say I have enough experience with Tk, nor that I know a lot about the
subject, but it's an area of personal interest and I would be glad to
help to write this guide if there's more people engaged on it.

David Welton wrote:
> I still think of Tcl as a first-rate language developed by
> first-rate people. If you accept that, you have to look elsewhere,
> at human/marketing/economics factors for its declining popularity.

As I said, I still feel I'm a rookie in Tcl/Tk, and I feel a bit wary
to throw my two cents in a discussion among the Tcl monsters which
write the books and tutorials I study. But it's strange that here in
Brazil the largest group of Tclers on the web (in a Orkut community)
has few more than 100 members, and whenever I talk to IT professionals
about my programming hobby with Tcl/Tk they say they never heard about
the language.

This may be off-topic, but it seems to me that most people (including
Tcl monsters mentioned above) are so focused in the "engineering" and
the academic features of Tcl that the "marketing" and the practical
matters were left behind; and it's really strange that this people
seems quite unwilling to think about and work around this. Tcl is
classified as an "academic language" in the portuguese Wikipedia.
There is a lot of pages in the Wiki discussing things like lambda
procedures, emulation of other languages, advanced mathematics code
and algorithms, and while I can't argue against the importance of
these subjects, I believe (as a hobbyist programmer with no CS
background) that all this stuff will not attract new Tcl/Tk
programmers while there is not a decent printing solution (after all
those years, and I'm not talking about hackish workarounds); while
mobile and cloud computing support is still experimental and
theoretical; while the language, its extensions and programming tools
all look like ActiveState properties (I know this is not exactly true,
but many people have this impression); while there is a lot of
different OO systems and we can not find good documentation and
newcomers tutorials for any of them; while there is not a complete, up-
to-date and open-source visual programming environment because people
insist that Tcl/Tk is so easy that writing code in emacs or Vi is
faster; while there is not a freely available guide for Tk GUIs design
like the one mentioned previously; and so on.

I tend to think that all those lacks and problems are due to a reduced
number of developers in the TCT, and that this few (brilliant and
dedicated) people who maintains Tcl/Tk must do N other things for
feeding themselves and their families. But if this is the case, maybe
it would be good if the evolution and the decisions about Tcl/Tk were
not so much centered in the TCT and/or ActiveState. Or, who knows, it
would be useful to split the TCT in two teams, the "technical" and the
"marketing & advocacy" ones. Perhaps a modern, community-based, open
repository for code and extensions would bring more users. I don't
know, surely there's a lot of people with ideas to help Tcl/Tk, and
maybe it's time to open the doors to these ideas. Tcl/Tk is too good
and versatile for being passively left in a "declining popularity"...
From: Larry W. Virden on 6 Apr 2010 07:19
On Apr 5, 6:10 pm, Robert H <sigz...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 5, 5:01 pm, Frédéric Bonnet <fredericbon...(a)free.fr> wrote:
>
> > tom.rmadilo wrote:
> > > Guess which language has solved all of these problems: C.
>
> > > Tcl, just co-ops the vast infrastructure of C.
>
> > QOTW
>
> Do we put those anywhere on the wiki?
>
> Robert

Not consistently - they often appear in the Tcl-URL! postings and
there is http://wiki.tcl.tk/qotw but not all appear.
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