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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 folk

• 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.