from Hacker News

Ask HN: Thoughts on Tcl as a Language in 2024?

by Decabytes on 7/27/24, 7:17 PM with 14 comments

by johnbuckman on 7/28/24, 8:50 AM
https://www.mistachkin.com/joe/ has been talking about setting up a Tcl Foundation and to use that to try to corral corporate donations toward further development. I think it’s a good idea and I’m trying to help. I’d recommend contacting Joe if you’d like to help.
by johnbuckman on 7/28/24, 8:44 AM
We’re using tcl’s Androwish build, to write tablet apps for Android to control our espresso machine, and the app runs nicely on Mac/win/linux “for free” and also makes app development more pleasant.
Distribution of an app with source easily modified (no build step) encourages tinkering.
Androwish also has a cool mp4 casting mode which replaces the screen rendering, that lets you use your app inside a web browser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GBmB6JSDnQ
by restore24 on 7/27/24, 9:20 PM
IMO, it has the best ergonomics among scripting languages for embedding into native applications. I'm using it as a serialization format for a game, with the JimTcl interpreter. It's easy to create fluent hierarchical structures that straddle the line between code and data:
```
  object "player" {
    health 100
    ammo 10
  }
```
https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl
by ofalkaed on 7/27/24, 7:28 PM
I feel much better about it in 2024 than I did in any year prior, probably because I finally sat down to actually learn it and tk. I am enjoying it quite a bit and I no longer hate doing GUI stuff.
by mayd on 7/29/24, 11:52 AM
Apart from the Tk and Expect extensions, one of the best parts of Tcl its general extensibility through the Tcl C API. Unfortunately, this is one of Tcl's less well-documented features. Most books and online tutorials either ignore it completely or, at best, provide perfunctory discussion and examples.
The other poorly documented feature is the objected-programming framework which was belatedly added after Tcl fell out of the mainstream of programming languages and so languishes unused.
The biggest problem of all is that that there is no online forum for Tcl users now that Google has dropped Groups. Usenet comp.lang.tcl was the main discussion forum and it is now gone.
by nrclark on 7/27/24, 8:27 PM
I like Tcl. It's still very common in the electronics design industry, and it's a fun language to write things in. Kind of feels halfway in-between LISP and Bash. Tcl is also found in Python (weirdly) as the implementation language of Tkinter.
It's not exactly a popular language these days, but it has its niches. It has a small runtime with an event loop and a nice GUI extension. It's stable, easy to embed into other programs, easy to write, supports networking and all kinds of OS operations, and has a large body of libraries and examples out there. Its performance is also pretty reasonable these days.
These days, I think that Lua and Python are more common as extension languages - and that's totally fine. But there will always be room in my toolbox for Tcl.
by vincent-manis on 7/27/24, 9:50 PM
It's really sad that Tk has gotten a lot less love in recent years. With the advent of multi-megabyte UI frameworks (one is named for a subatomic particle), we have forgotten the benefits of a small, well-documented UI interface that is highly portable across OSes and architectures, and whose API can be invoked from virtually any language, with only a thin wrapper (I routinely use Tk from Scheme, for example).
Yes, Tk UIs nowadays look kind of clunky, and they don't cover the entire span of things that a UI should manage. Neither of these is a fatal flaw; if somebody wanted to put in a small amount of money, both could be easily addressed. Since there is apparently no prospect of this happening, I expect Tk to fall further and further behind. Shame.
by turtleyacht on 7/27/24, 8:27 PM
Commercial support available for 8.6.
8.6.14 released February of this year, with 9.x beta May 2024.
Tcler's Wiki has recent posts:
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/
Still hoping the older books are relevant.