Serious question: I've never met a programmer who has ever actually written anything in Tcl in the real world. If you've working in Tcl, tell me about it! What did you use it for and when? Was it awesome/terrible/etc.?
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
49 points (98.0% liked)
Linux
48656 readers
549 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
It's widely used in the EDA (chip design) industry. (Unfortunately)
I inherited completely undocumented TCL code at work. I had never heard of TCL before that. That was fun.
The molecular mechanical modeller NAMD and its viewer use TCL as the CLI interface, and it's...fine. I would prefer BASH or python, but it works just fine.
Also Tk is how most LaTeX drawing is dealt with, so trying to modify, say circuit diagrams or chemical structures drawn directly in LaTeX (I.e. chemfig) requires using some Tcl. Again, it's...fine. No huge complaints.
Edit: bad memory, the drawing program in LaTeX is TikZ not TkZ, its unrelated to Tk.
Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar's Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.
It's been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the "glue" language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.
I created a report generator, When I open the app it welcomes me to a drop-down menu where I select the customer name and click generate and it opens a .pdf with some charts and graphs.
I could have done it with .js or in excel but it takes about 5 or 6 seconds in python where as anything I'd done in .js was adequate, it would seem like it took too long to print/render. And well, excel would have given me some idiotic error a few months down the road.
But other than that? Not much really.
But you mean you wrote it in python with tkinter as a toolkit, rather than writing it in Tcl (which is its own language, like python).
yeah, my bad.
@petsoi I have not touched Tcl for years, but I remember with awe what a versatile script/programming language can be designed on top of such a minimalistic syntax.