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Despite the numerous books and talk about Tcl, I've never seen any actual Tcl for two reasons. 1) It seems to be used in GUIs for biological and medical scienc

by vortico 12y ago

Despite the numerous books and talk about Tcl, I've never seen any actual Tcl for two reasons. 1) It seems to be used in GUIs for biological and medical sciences only, which is distant from my field. 2) There are absolutely no code samples on the surface of tcl.tk or on this article, and after clicking "Random Page" a statistically significant number of times I found that only 1/6 pages have any Tcl code at all. Even the tutorial for the language itself has a strangely low code-to-text ratio. It makes me wonder that the developers are wanting to hide the code due to shame, or the CEO bosses behind the project only feel that advertising features of the implementation, applications, and the language's popularity are important, while in fact these are relatively useless to speculating and beginner Tcl programmers.

stormbrew 12y ago
Almost all of my exposure to TCL was IRC clients (xircon) and bots (eggdrop) in the 90s. Also my first job used it in some capacity that I forget, but it was through the tcl at that job that I had my first exposure to an event driven framework with chaining (twisted python style). It's a pretty odd language, but has some interesting and powerful ideas in it.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Mine was the ArsDigita stack and Vignette StoryServer. There was a lot of the latter in the wild for a long time.
peteretep 12y ago
> It seems to be used in GUIs for biological and medical > sciences only, which is distant from my field. Technically that's Tk, isn't it? I've written quite a lot of Perl that uses Tk before, and there was even an ORA book about it.
- vortico 12y ago
  Well, yes. Technically. Although I personally haven't seen Tcl in use without Tk.
michaelsbradley 12y ago
Expect[1] (a Tcl-based tool) is still quite useful despite its age, and Don Libes' book[2] is a devops classic (if there is such a thing). The examples directory[3] from expect's source code repository should help you get the flavor of good Tcl programming. `brew install expect` `apt-get install expect` Readily available on many other platforms as well, including Windows. [1] http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm [2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do [3] http://expect.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/expect/expect/example/ http://expect.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/expect/expect/examp...
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  GCC testsuite is still written in DejaGnu, which is written in Expect. http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/ http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/ It works for what it does.
cleverjake 12y ago
way back when, a large amount of AOL stuff was written in tcl. AOLServer was one, and they actually opened sourced it - https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver
- evilotto 12y ago
  And lest you think that AOLserver is dead based on the lack of new activity on that github repo (which is just a mirror, BTW), Naviserver - https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver - which was forked from AOLserver some time ago, just released a new version yesterday.
biomimic 12y ago
TiVo started out as a Tcl house too. Their boxes have a Tcl tcp socket server that I built installed on each one.
serverhorror 12y ago
I too had that impression. I can vouch for (1) being correct since I am managing an HPC Cluster for a company right now. The way to to is modules.sf.net (or the newer and nicer Lmod which is Lua). The usual need is for a multitude of versions being avaible and easily usable. This starts at the compiler level and goes up to stuff like I have 5 versions of Tool X. This needs Python 2.7.3 (yes exactly that version). Now make it easy for me to use it. It has been my only touching point with TCL so far -- I. Don't. Like. It.
schlenk 12y ago
Well, you might not notice Tcl if you see it sometimes. For example have a look at the build scripts in MacPorts, those are valid Tcl programs (if you load the needed procs first). https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.examples.html https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.examples.html As Tcl is very often used for DSL style usecases, you might mistaken Tcl code for more or less pseudo code, config files or something like that.

by vortico 12y ago

stormbrew 12y ago

Almost all of my exposure to TCL was IRC clients (xircon) and bots (eggdrop) in the 90s. Also my first job used it in some capacity that I forget, but it was through the tcl at that job that I had my first exposure to an event driven framework with chaining (twisted python style). It's a pretty odd language, but has some interesting and powerful ideas in it.

rodgerd 12y ago
Mine was the ArsDigita stack and Vignette StoryServer. There was a lot of the latter in the wild for a long time.

peteretep 12y ago

> It seems to be used in GUIs for biological and medical > sciences only, which is distant from my field. Technically that's Tk, isn't it? I've written quite a lot of Perl that uses Tk before, and there was even an ORA book about it.

vortico 12y ago
Well, yes. Technically. Although I personally haven't seen Tcl in use without Tk.

michaelsbradley 12y ago

Expect[1] (a Tcl-based tool) is still quite useful despite its age, and Don Libes' book[2] is a devops classic (if there is such a thing). The examples directory[3] from expect's source code repository should help you get the flavor of good Tcl programming. `brew install expect` `apt-get install expect` Readily available on many other platforms as well, including Windows. [1] http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm [2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do [3] http://expect.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/expect/expect/example/ http://expect.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/expect/expect/examp...

sanxiyn 12y ago
GCC testsuite is still written in DejaGnu, which is written in Expect. http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/ http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/ It works for what it does.

cleverjake 12y ago

way back when, a large amount of AOL stuff was written in tcl. AOLServer was one, and they actually opened sourced it - https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver

evilotto 12y ago
And lest you think that AOLserver is dead based on the lack of new activity on that github repo (which is just a mirror, BTW), Naviserver - https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver - which was forked from AOLserver some time ago, just released a new version yesterday.

biomimic 12y ago

TiVo started out as a Tcl house too. Their boxes have a Tcl tcp socket server that I built installed on each one.

serverhorror 12y ago

I too had that impression. I can vouch for (1) being correct since I am managing an HPC Cluster for a company right now. The way to to is modules.sf.net (or the newer and nicer Lmod which is Lua). The usual need is for a multitude of versions being avaible and easily usable. This starts at the compiler level and goes up to stuff like I have 5 versions of Tool X. This needs Python 2.7.3 (yes exactly that version). Now make it easy for me to use it. It has been my only touching point with TCL so far -- I. Don't. Like. It.

schlenk 12y ago

Well, you might not notice Tcl if you see it sometimes. For example have a look at the build scripts in MacPorts, those are valid Tcl programs (if you load the needed procs first). https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.examples.html https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.examples.html As Tcl is very often used for DSL style usecases, you might mistaken Tcl code for more or less pseudo code, config files or something like that.