Amazing

Posted Sep 30, 2024 15:05 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: Tcl/Tk 9.0 released

Wow. I love Tcl/Tk. The Tk toolkit is really amazing for whipping up quick desktop GUIs, and I think its geometry managers are as good as anything that has come since.

TCL/TK deserve to be better known

Posted Sep 30, 2024 15:21 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (4 responses)

the "module" system used in HPC is based on Tcl but most users do not realize the power of the system and how a properly written module file can be reused unchanged for most module (by looking at the path to the module file itself).

TCL/TK deserve to be better known

Posted Sep 30, 2024 16:28 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree that Tcl/Tk is sadly under-rated and little-known. It has found a niche in some EDA (Electronic Design Automation) products, but it really deserves to be much more widely used.

Tk is the default GUI for Python

Posted Sep 30, 2024 17:33 UTC (Mon) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link]

Not many people use Tcl, but Tk is the GUI bundled with Python (though distributions tend to remove it from the base package). I would have thought that the majority of developers would have heard of Tcl (though they might just think of it as the thing you say before Tk).

TCL/TK deserve to be better known

Posted Sep 30, 2024 16:58 UTC (Mon) by devnull13 (subscriber, #18626) [Link]

We used to use modules a long time ago when your $PATH variable could get longer than the limit (circa 1990s on SunOS). My boss always ran into that problem. 🥺 I also fondly remember using the module commands to switch compilers or to temporarily add packages on HPC machines. Time flies, that was more than 15 years ago. 🙂

TCL/TK deserve to be better known

Posted Sep 30, 2024 18:25 UTC (Mon) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

Nowadays there's Lmod, which is an improved implementation of the modules system, that happens to be implemented in Lua rather than Tcl. And in yet other HPC style environments, containers are increasingly used as a way to provide each app with whatever crazy combination of libraries it needs rather than needing a module system to provide everything under the sun.

Also, nowadays many HPC admins no longer write their mod/Lmod files manually, but use 'meta build systems' like spack or easybuild that generate module files as part of the build.

That being said, the original Tcl module system was awesome back in the day and was pretty essential in many HPC sites.