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Could you provide more information on which documentation you found poor ? Tcl certainly has a lot of it, in the official manual pages for everything as well a

Could you provide more information on which documentation you found poor ? Tcl certainly has a lot of it, in the official manual pages for everything as well as the wiki.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Sure, but I'm mostly going from memory though. I'm on macOS. Installing the latest version was confusing. There's a tcl-tk package in homebrew-core, and a tcl package in homebrew-cask. The tcl package is ActiveTcl. What's the difference? On the tcl.tk site, if you try getting the binary it'll point you to ActiveTcl. Diving into the wiki was very confusing. Lots of articles have comments by random people, and it's not always clear if their comments are relevant or outdated. There's dozens of links, and hard to discern which ones are worth looking into. Lot of links are dead. The differences between the different Tclkits is not obvious, too many choices. And how do they relate to starkit? I think I remember having downloaded an sdx compiled widget, and I couldn't find the sdx utility, so I couldn't unwrap it. Tons of dead links in the Great Unified Tcl/Tk Extension Repository [0]. Almost nobody puts up screenshots of their widgets. It's also frustrating to find out that Tcl Dev Kit is a paid component. I'm probably spoiled by other languages, so this might be pretty entitled of me, but I'd consider the dev kit's tools to be essential. The most important tools for me would be the debugger, linter, and inspector. As a standalone user, I'm not going to pay $300 just to play around with a programming language. It would be a huge improvement if they were made freely available, even if under a non-commercial license. Then people can try it out, and if they find a good use-case in their job, they might buy a license. I've done that with other software. To give a concrete example: in a few college projects and hackathons I used highcharts [1], a JS charting library. Since it provides a free non-commercial license, I ended up learning how to use it pretty well. Fast forward a bit, and the company I was with wanted data-dense interactive charts. I evaluated a few options, but was most satisfied with highcharts, so I happily convinced them to buy a license. That's also similar to what Qt has been doing too, and it has been hugely successful. You can use the free open source version, which is licensed under GPL and LGPGv3. But if you want to keep things locked down, you can pay ~$3500/year for their commercial offering. Most humans probably won't pay for the commercial version unless they're full time app developers, but businesses tend to have much deeper pockets. [0] http://core.tcl.tk/jenglish/gutter/ http://core.tcl.tk/jenglish/gutter/ [1] https://www.highcharts.com/products/highcharts https://www.highcharts.com/products/highcharts
- rkeene2 9y ago
  This is great information. Thank you for putting it together I'll bring it up on the Tcl'ers chat !

Could you provide more information on which documentation you found poor ? Tcl certainly has a lot of it, in the official manual pages for everything as well as the wiki.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

Sure, but I'm mostly going from memory though. I'm on macOS. Installing the latest version was confusing. There's a tcl-tk package in homebrew-core, and a tcl package in homebrew-cask. The tcl package is ActiveTcl. What's the difference? On the tcl.tk site, if you try getting the binary it'll point you to ActiveTcl. Diving into the wiki was very confusing. Lots of articles have comments by random people, and it's not always clear if their comments are relevant or outdated. There's dozens of links, and hard to discern which ones are worth looking into. Lot of links are dead. The differences between the different Tclkits is not obvious, too many choices. And how do they relate to starkit? I think I remember having downloaded an sdx compiled widget, and I couldn't find the sdx utility, so I couldn't unwrap it. Tons of dead links in the Great Unified Tcl/Tk Extension Repository [0]. Almost nobody puts up screenshots of their widgets. It's also frustrating to find out that Tcl Dev Kit is a paid component. I'm probably spoiled by other languages, so this might be pretty entitled of me, but I'd consider the dev kit's tools to be essential. The most important tools for me would be the debugger, linter, and inspector. As a standalone user, I'm not going to pay $300 just to play around with a programming language. It would be a huge improvement if they were made freely available, even if under a non-commercial license. Then people can try it out, and if they find a good use-case in their job, they might buy a license. I've done that with other software. To give a concrete example: in a few college projects and hackathons I used highcharts [1], a JS charting library. Since it provides a free non-commercial license, I ended up learning how to use it pretty well. Fast forward a bit, and the company I was with wanted data-dense interactive charts. I evaluated a few options, but was most satisfied with highcharts, so I happily convinced them to buy a license. That's also similar to what Qt has been doing too, and it has been hugely successful. You can use the free open source version, which is licensed under GPL and LGPGv3. But if you want to keep things locked down, you can pay ~$3500/year for their commercial offering. Most humans probably won't pay for the commercial version unless they're full time app developers, but businesses tend to have much deeper pockets. [0] http://core.tcl.tk/jenglish/gutter/ http://core.tcl.tk/jenglish/gutter/ [1] https://www.highcharts.com/products/highcharts https://www.highcharts.com/products/highcharts

rkeene2 9y ago
This is great information. Thank you for putting it together I'll bring it up on the Tcl'ers chat !