Re: [TCLCORE] Tcl GSoC 2011 - Ideas anyone ?

On Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Kevin Walzer wrote:

> > If you think TK is moving just fine, you are both right and completely wrong.> > What it has is fine, what has been added is fine, the movement, not so fine.> > TK has enough there to be *the* toolkit that everyone wants to use. For a> > long time it was the toolkit. Now? Not so much. It's still better but people> > have moved on. I'd like to bring them back. I'd like to see 20-something> > hackers groovin on TK. If you look around, we're all old dudes. My next> > birthday is 50 and I'm young compared to most of the core team and most of> > the people doing stuff with tcl/tk.> > > > I challenge you to find a team of 20-somethings that want to use tcl/tk.> > Well, the 20-something hackers I know are writing in Objective-C, > pursuing careers as indie Cocoa/Mac/iOS developers. Tcl/Tk doesn't show > up on their radar, but then again nothing developed outside of Cupertino > shows up on their radar.> > Is this a problem for Tcl/Tk? I'm not sure it is, and I'm not sure I > care. I took up Tcl/Tk development in my 30's, and I'm 42 now. I'm not > a computer scientist by training (my Ph.D. is in English), but I still > think I count as (relatively) new blood.> > > > > My argument is not about stagnation, it is about new developers. If you> > aren't growing you are dieing. By that metric, tcl is dieing.> > By that metric Tcl has been dying since about 2000 or so, but it's still > here.
Languages don't really die. Look at COBOL. 

However, when I look at all the "meaningful" things that are happening out there, Tcl is not represented at all.

Web frameworks: I can name several from Python, Perl and Ruby. Those get talked about all the time on the net.

GUI toolkits: The ones I see getting posts and getting tutorials at conferences (Pycon has Qt ones this year) are either wx or qt based, not Tk.

no-sql databases: This seem to be a big thing now with Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis etc. I go to their sites and I see Python, Perl and Ruby bindings.

Name something "happening" out there...then see if Tcl is involved with it. My guess is probably not.

Some of these "issues" are because the Tcl community is small. A lot of these "issues" are because nobody sees Tcl or Tk.

My question to Larry would be, what do you want to happen? You didn't post this out of the blue. I imagine you have thoughts on some things you would like done?

My .02

-- 
Robert

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