Tcl-Lang Showcase

121 points by luismedel 222 days ago | 44 comments

Tcl was my first "general purpose" programming language (after TI-basic and Matlab).

When I started that job I didn't know the difference between Tcl and TCP. I spent a couple months studying Phillip Greenspuns books. It also made me a better engineer because unlike PHP I couldn't just Google how to do basic web server stuff so I had to learn from first principles. That's how I ended up building my first asset minification pipeline that served the "$file.gz" if it existed with content-encoding: gzip.

Nearly 20 years later and I'm basically a http specialist (well, CDN/Ingress/mesh/proxy/web performance).

Tcl is still kind of neat in a hacky way (no other language I've run across regularly uses upvars so creatively).

Shout-out to ad_proc and aolserver.

pjmlp 222 days ago | |

AOLServer was the inspiration to the product I worked on, during my first experience working at a dotcom startup.

We had something similar, however it would plug into Apache and IIS, more configurable across several UNIXes and RDMS, and eventually even got an IDE coded in VB, for those folks not wanting to use the Emacs based tooling.

Eventually we also became a victim of the dotcom burst, however many of those ideas were the genesis of OutSytems platform, then rebooted on top of .NET, and still going strong on the market nowadays.

KasianFranks 222 days ago |

In 1996/7 I had a chance to use Tcl/Tk to build one of the first stock tickers on the web called DigitalTrader [1], after that we used it to build some of the first vector embeddings in 2005 for early biological language models at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab [2,3] for space biosciences. Still a fan.

[1] https://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.misc/199...

[2] https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-t...

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7987191B2/en

doublerabbit 222 days ago |

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 of simplicity it just works out of the box, execution in a single file, in a sanely manner.

Wrap a variable in brackets {} and you've secured yourself from injections or run the procedure in a lightening safe interpreter if your paranoid.

Threading is a breeze. It does make you think in a different methodology which folk may rebuttal, but once you get it, it's great.

NaviServer too, AOLs original webserver is awesome.

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/NaviServer

https://github.com/naviserver-project/naviserver

mzi 222 days ago | |

Nitpick: it's flak, not flack. It's a german abbreviation of Flugzeugabwehrkanone or anti-aircraft gun

justusthane 222 days ago | |

I’ll do another nitpick: “rebuttal” is a noun. “Rebut” is the verb you’re looking for.

doublerabbit 222 days ago | | |

Missed the edit window. Noted for the future though, thanks.

dizzant 222 days ago |

I used Tcl at my very first internship for test automation. Coming from a self-taught Javascript/Java/C#/C++ background, Tcl really stretched my concept of what a programming language is, especially how it plays with stack frames and munges string values.

Coincidentally Tcl also inspired my first deep dive into Vim. The test automation framework at that company required meaty Tcl expressions packed into CSV cells. Tcl was mind-boggling enough when properly formatted, so hand-editing squashed 1800 character long expressions on a single line was way too much. I'm fairly certain the assignment was part hazing and the framework part "job security".

Jokes on them, I spent 2 weeks on a side quest to make a Vim plugin that could add line breaks and indent a Tcl expression into a split temporary buffer for editing and squash it back to the right cell when I was done. Halfway through the summer I had completed the entire backlog. The manager got a reprimand for being a jerk and I spent the rest of the summer making the framework less painful.

bitwize 222 days ago |

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.

jhardcastle 222 days ago |

Tcl/Tk was used by the first open source project I ever contributed to 25 years ago – a client for AOL Instant Messenger called TiK. It was such a thrill to be able to hack on the client, see the changes in almost real time, and share with others. It's great to see Tcl still around and kicking!

https://tik.sourceforge.net/

treesknees 221 days ago | |

There is an open source server that implements the protocols used by AIM including TOC and Oscar. You can run TiK like it’s 2001 again.

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server/

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server/blob/main/docs/CLIE...

doodpants 222 days ago |

"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.

zamadatix 222 days ago | |

I'm guessing it works fine until there is load :). The design does seem to just proxy noVNC to a Linux host.

kragen 222 days ago | |

I wonder if you could maybe just compile wish to Wasm with Emscripten?

hoppp 222 days ago | |

Worked for me

nu11ptr 222 days ago | |

same here

rickcarlino 222 days ago |

I wish more scripting languages (other than TCL and Python) had desktop GUI support out of the box. I don’t even need a good one, just having an OK GUI lib that isn’t a full blown third party webview frameworks would be nice for one off utilities.

gt0 221 days ago | |

I used REBOL about 20 years for something like this, an interesting TCL-like language with a GUI built in, I found it quite charming to look at, but it was dated even 20 years ago.

HyperCard was an interesting way to do this too. Perhaps with some work to make it a bit more user friendly and less alien feeling, Smalltalk/Pharo has potential.

sph 222 days ago |

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.

ofalkaed 222 days ago | |

I suspect there are a great many, Tcl/Tk makes it a very easy project but once you start using your editor to edit the code for your editor you realize you can edit your editor while you edit in it without restarting. Couple weeks later you have an editor filled with undocumented features and a weird skew towards editing the languages you use most and tailored to your personal coding quirks and style.

At least that is how it went for me. Once I got basic functionality working it turned into something that evolves instead of being written; working on some project and realize a certain feature would be great, open editor's built in console and write a few procs, send it to the interpreter, test, save, continue on with other project, fully intend to document and improve/generalize later, repeat until it turns into something only you can use.

seschwar 222 days ago | |

Vim is scriptable with TCL: https://vimhelp.org/if_tcl.txt.html

isr 222 days ago | |

[tcl'ers wiki page on tcl editors](https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Tcl+Editors)

An interesting one I hacked around with for a while is [ma](https://github.com/kdltr/ma). It's a single window implementation of an acme-like editor. It was originally written (& still used by) Felix Winkleman, the creator of chicken scheme

shawn_w 222 days ago | |

There have been a few but I think they're all dead these days.

Alphatk for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphatk

dlowe-net 222 days ago | |

BBEdit started in the 90s and was an early adopter for TCL extensibility.

kragen 222 days ago | |

This is a really interesting idea, and I don't know why I haven't seen one—it seems like such an obviously good idea.

ggcdn 222 days ago |

Many structural engineering graduate students still get exposed to TCL as its the input language of the OpenSees framework for structural and earthquake engineering.

https://opensees.ist.berkeley.edu/wiki/index.php?title=OpenS...

Luckily, there is also now a python interpreter.

Fuzzwah 222 days ago |

Seeing other people comment about being exposed to TCL via professional reasons made me want to add that I learned TCL because it's what eggdrop IRC bots used.

To this day I have a number of bot related side projects. Though they're now for discord and slack and written in python or ruby. I miss IRC, eggdrop, and TCL.

y1n0 222 days ago |

I use tcl at work. It’s fine, but it’s one of those languages that’s heavily tilted toward “easy to write but hard to read.”

TCL can be so customized that it’s unrecognizable, breaking all compatibility between hosts.

don_searchcraft 221 days ago |

I used Tcl a lot early in my career, building sites for the web using Vignette StoryServer as well as AOLServer. It powered a lot of the early 2000s web.

hoppp 222 days ago |

Tcl is cool. It looks a bit old but its nice vibes

unixhero 221 days ago |

When I dabbled with TCL in 1996, I didn't understand the difference between TCL, mIRC code and TK.

DonHopkins 222 days ago |

Here's a talk I gave many years ago at the Toronto Usenix Symposium about porting SimCity to TCL/Tk:

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...