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Reminds of Tcl/Tk and its derivatives like Perl/Tk. Simple cross platform GUIs are really simple with these. Of course you wouldn't write a Browser or a Office

Reminds of Tcl/Tk and its derivatives like Perl/Tk. Simple cross platform GUIs are really simple with these. Of course you wouldn't write a Browser or a Office Suit with it, but for many apps it should be enough. I never understood why it didn't gain more popularity.

shoes_for_thee 6y ago
If my recollection from the late 90s is to be trusted, tcl/tk was indeed very popular for a time, but gtk and qt came on the scene and quickly dominated as folks wanted their apps to share the look & feel of gnome or kde.
- mhd 6y ago
  For the open source UI sector, yes. Tk also fell back in the support of widgets people knew from e.g. Windows. If I recall correctly, an editable combo box was only available through extensions. In those days, memory consumption was also an issue, where native apps just did better. That was also what brought down Mono/Gtk. I think for quite a while, Tk was still a good option where its competition were things like Swing -- enterprise and engineering apps. Especially visualization, quick input dialogs for otherwise CLI apps etc. Not that visible for regular users. Tcl/Tk had its issues, and we probably would've been better off with something like Display Postscript, both as a language and display technology, but it was a very pragmatic solution for quite a while. I'd still say that a lot of ad-hoc UIs could probably be done faster with Tk than with some web framework.
brutt 6y ago
Awful look (at Linux), awful UX, awful name, bad i18n. GTK+ is much better, e.g. perl gtk3 module [0]. [0]: https://github.com/dave-theunsub/gtk3-perl-demos https://github.com/dave-theunsub/gtk3-perl-demos
- andrewl-hn 6y ago
  The UI you see on screenshots is for Shoes 4 which is a rewrite of the original library in JRuby + SWT. The original is it's own widgets, but there existed ports to GTK and maybe others. The main part of shoes is the API design, all implementations follow the original API as described in the book.
  - brutt 6y ago
    My reply was about Tcl/Tk.

shoes_for_thee 6y ago

If my recollection from the late 90s is to be trusted, tcl/tk was indeed very popular for a time, but gtk and qt came on the scene and quickly dominated as folks wanted their apps to share the look & feel of gnome or kde.

mhd 6y ago
For the open source UI sector, yes. Tk also fell back in the support of widgets people knew from e.g. Windows. If I recall correctly, an editable combo box was only available through extensions. In those days, memory consumption was also an issue, where native apps just did better. That was also what brought down Mono/Gtk. I think for quite a while, Tk was still a good option where its competition were things like Swing -- enterprise and engineering apps. Especially visualization, quick input dialogs for otherwise CLI apps etc. Not that visible for regular users. Tcl/Tk had its issues, and we probably would've been better off with something like Display Postscript, both as a language and display technology, but it was a very pragmatic solution for quite a while. I'd still say that a lot of ad-hoc UIs could probably be done faster with Tk than with some web framework.

brutt 6y ago

Awful look (at Linux), awful UX, awful name, bad i18n. GTK+ is much better, e.g. perl gtk3 module [0]. [0]: https://github.com/dave-theunsub/gtk3-perl-demos https://github.com/dave-theunsub/gtk3-perl-demos

andrewl-hn 6y ago
The UI you see on screenshots is for Shoes 4 which is a rewrite of the original library in JRuby + SWT. The original is it's own widgets, but there existed ports to GTK and maybe others. The main part of shoes is the API design, all implementations follow the original API as described in the book.
- brutt 6y ago
  My reply was about Tcl/Tk.