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ISVs providing Linux downloads

ISVs providing Linux downloads

Posted Sep 16, 2012 13:31 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: ISVs providing Linux downloads by khim
Parent article: Meeks: Linux on the (consumer) Desktop

Tcl/Tk – once you get used to it – is much better than its reputation would suggest (Sun would have been able to make a difference when John Ousterhout was at Sunlabs but by that time they had another language to hype).

As it is, Tcl/Tk remains one of the better-kept secrets of the industry; lots of people use it as a work horse but it isn't as »hip« as some of the other languages in the same space – even though it is very well engineered and documented and has been quite innovative in lots of areas. For example, Tcl offered full Unicode support with the release of Tcl 8.1 in 1997, way before any of the other popular languages followed suit, and of course Tk revolutionised X11 GUIs in the early 1990s when everyone else's idea of GUI programming involved C and OSF/Motif. Tcl/Tk can do things like cross-platform single-file deployment that are very helpful and simply not available with most other similar languages. Too bad it doesn't get the attention it deserves.


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