11–20 of 45 posts
[1] https://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.misc/199...
[2] https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-t...
I'm currently working on a PXE provisioning system with Tcl. This crafts a KickStart configuration hosted on a virtual URL. LUks is a requirement and requires a random password on each workstation. Password generation with handmade web gui stored natively in sqlite all under 200 LoC so far. Tcl gets flak, but it's battle tested. Still under active development and has a cool GUI, Tk, I love it as a language. In terms…
I'm currently working on a PXE provisioning system with Tcl. This crafts a KickStart configuration hosted on a virtual URL. LUks is a requirement and requires a random password on each workstation. Password generation with handmade web gui stored natively in sqlite all under 200 LoC so far. Tcl gets flak, but it's battle tested. Still under active development and has a cool GUI, Tk, I love it as a language. In terms…
I’ll do another nitpick: “rebuttal” is a noun. “Rebut” is the verb you’re looking for.
A lot of people on Hackernews get wistful for VB. But the VB of the Unix world is still here—Tcl/Tk. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's the fastest way I've seen to get from zero to functional GUI. Entire desktop environments have been built in it—before GNOME 1.0 even came out. It even has metaprogramming capabilities that approach Lisp in flexibility.
Though there was an attempt[2] to make a Visual Tcl at some point. IIRC one neat aspect was that the program was actually live while you were designing it instead of having separate design / run modes.
[0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
A lot of people on Hackernews get wistful for VB. But the VB of the Unix world is still here—Tcl/Tk. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's the fastest way I've seen to get from zero to functional GUI. Entire desktop environments have been built in it—before GNOME 1.0 even came out. It even has metaprogramming capabilities that approach Lisp in flexibility.
VB and Tcl/Tk are very different at a fundamental level. Nowadays the closest to VB would be Lazarus[0]. There is also Gambas[1] though personally i haven't tried that recently (it also cannot make binaries for Windows FWIW) and back when i did, it was very clunky. Though there was an attempt[2] to make a Visual Tcl at some point. IIRC one neat aspect was that the program was actually live while you were designing it…
Well, yes, I get that—and I much prefer Tcl. What I meant was it filled the role of "tool you use to get a GUI together quickly", especially in the early 90s. Gambas and Lazarus were not around back then.
Lazarus is closer to Delphi than VB, and I've found it to be clunky also in practice if not in principle; Delphi took on a lot of production workload in the 90s, and having an open source workalike would be a boon to business. We seem to have trashed tools that enabled line-of-business apps to be built by single devs, only for AI companies to sell that ability back to us again in the form of LLM assistance. Sometimes I hate this civilization.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/keynote.html
At that point in history (1993), TCL/Tk was ideal for what I wanted to do. It was very easy to integrate with C code (exposing the SimCity simulation engine and callback as TCL commands), and implement custom Tk components (like pie menus) and services (like a real time sound mixer).
w_piem.c: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
I also made a multi player version of SimCity that took advantage of the X11 version of TCL/Tk's ability to open multiple displays at once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Multi Player SimCity Announcement: http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.htm...
SimCity on SGI Indigo: http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif
SimCity on Sun OLWM: http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif
SimCity on NCD X Terminal: http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif
I visited Professor John Ousterhout at his office at UCB with an SGI Indigo to give him a demo and express my gratitude and admiration, and demonstrated it running across two SGIs at the ACM InterCHI '93 conference Interactive Experience to demonstrate the cooperative multi player aspects like multiple views, multiple cursors, collaborative editing, and voting.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html
Eventually I talked EA into open sourcing SimCity, cleaned up the TCL version, and released it on the OLPC (and renamed it Micropolis to not infringe on Maxis/EA's trademark):
Open Sourcing SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...
micropolis activity: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/micropol...
micropolis.tcl: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
"By clicking on the image, an interactive demonstration of the Tcl/Tk application is launched using CloudTk." No it isn't; I just get an empty frame with a close button. This is consistent on multiple browsers/platforms.
https://opensees.ist.berkeley.edu/wiki/index.php?title=OpenS...
Luckily, there is also now a python interpreter.
I've been thinking of writing an extensible editor scriptable with Tcl, but - surely someone somewhere must have already written one, no? I couldn't find anything that wasn't just a toy.
