The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 23:47 UTC (Sat) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by jmorris42
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Sorry, but that's not a fair assessment. TCL/TK, like GTK+, is a _toolkit_ not a desktop environment. I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.

to post comments

Tcl/Tk

Posted Mar 21, 2011 15:36 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.

I don't know of any desktop environments based on Tk, period. However, I love Tcl/Tk and I think the GNOME developers could learn a lot by studying it. Here's why:

Tcl/Tk has extensive and well-written documentation in good old UNIX troff format. The API is completely documented both at the Tcl level and at the C integration level.
The C code is very clean and well-documented.
Tcl/Tk has continued to evolve over the decades, but retains the essence of what Tcl and Tk are. New features are carefully considered and added, but only when they fit in with the existing design philosophy. There's never been a "the entire Universe has changed" release of Tcl/Tk. GNOME could do well to study this last point.