3 ms·

During parts of my career, it looked like there was a whole alternate software universe where the foundation was both legacy and spanking new Fortran code with

by mhd 11y ago

During parts of my career, it looked like there was a whole alternate software universe where the foundation was both legacy and spanking new Fortran code with various Tcl/Tk interfaces (often outdated custom versions). And these days, I'm not quite sure whether they weren't better off…

forinti 11y ago
Having worked with both Tcl/Tk (and Perl/Tk) and Java (AWT and Swing), I find Tk is better for most jobs, because it is so simple. In fact, I am certain that all the desktop apps I've worked with would be much simpler to maintain and distribute were they written in Tcl/Tk.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I agree. The simplicity of both made them a major contender for the agent-oriented programming trend that tried to happen in the 90's. If presentation and logic are separated, Tcl/Tk can be seen as a sort of DSL or 4GL for GUI development. That's how I used it. Now, there's plenty of lightweight, portable, GUI toolkits to use that I can just write a wrapper or code-generator for. Tcl/TK is less necessary than before. Still among simplest, though.
PaulHoule 11y ago
The funny thing about legacy code in scientific programming is that it is not so much of a "bad smell" as it is in commercial work. It is hard to write numerical code that consistently works correctly in the face of rounding errors and the like, and it is hard to know if you are getting the right answers in many cases. It makes sense to use the old code (which performs well) rather than write something new and take the risk of screwing it up in some subtle way. It is not hard at all to access FORTRAN data structures from C, Python, Java or whatever your favorite "modern" language is.
rootbear 11y ago
Fifteen years ago, the modern parts of the Pixar animation system used Tcl/Tk for the GUI. The older code looked like Tektronix 4013 displays... I didn't work on GUI code much, but what I did do was fun. Since this was an internal application only, it didn't have to look slick and modern, it just needed to have all of the features required by Production and be reasonably fast and reliable. I have no idea what the software looks like now.

by mhd 11y ago

forinti 11y ago

Having worked with both Tcl/Tk (and Perl/Tk) and Java (AWT and Swing), I find Tk is better for most jobs, because it is so simple. In fact, I am certain that all the desktop apps I've worked with would be much simpler to maintain and distribute were they written in Tcl/Tk.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
I agree. The simplicity of both made them a major contender for the agent-oriented programming trend that tried to happen in the 90's. If presentation and logic are separated, Tcl/Tk can be seen as a sort of DSL or 4GL for GUI development. That's how I used it. Now, there's plenty of lightweight, portable, GUI toolkits to use that I can just write a wrapper or code-generator for. Tcl/TK is less necessary than before. Still among simplest, though.

PaulHoule 11y ago

The funny thing about legacy code in scientific programming is that it is not so much of a "bad smell" as it is in commercial work. It is hard to write numerical code that consistently works correctly in the face of rounding errors and the like, and it is hard to know if you are getting the right answers in many cases. It makes sense to use the old code (which performs well) rather than write something new and take the risk of screwing it up in some subtle way. It is not hard at all to access FORTRAN data structures from C, Python, Java or whatever your favorite "modern" language is.

rootbear 11y ago

Fifteen years ago, the modern parts of the Pixar animation system used Tcl/Tk for the GUI. The older code looked like Tektronix 4013 displays... I didn't work on GUI code much, but what I did do was fun. Since this was an internal application only, it didn't have to look slick and modern, it just needed to have all of the features required by Production and be reasonably fast and reliable. I have no idea what the software looks like now.