From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-04-02T11:14:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting Ruby approved

In article <k7jq41h37c8sl15buep2m6fku1chpdhg7j@4ax.com>,
tony summerfelt  <snowzone5@hotmail.com> wrote:
>On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 11:56:17 +0900, you wrote:
>
>
>>Neither of these points sells Ruby. What sells Ruby is the
>>productivity that programmers have when they use it.
>
>>This is only my opinion: I don't consider Perl as being on a level
>>with Ruby in this respect, and Tcl is not even close. 
>
>interesting. i see a lot of messages here along the lines of 'which
>gui kit should i use with ruby'...and then everyone  pipes up with
>their favorite...
>
>of course by then in tcl/tk land, we've already finished coding up our
>interfaces :)
>
>i had a client tender for a very specific one-time utility. they asked
>in house c++ and java programmers, and externally my name came up
>because of the local perl work i've done...
>
>when i read the specs for the program they wanted i told them they
>could have it in an hour if they didn't care about which language it
>was (they were expecting perl from me at that point).
>
>i used tcl/tk...the interface, which needed a certain arraignment of
>widgets,  took maybe 5 minutes to code up (a RAD tool  at this point
>would have slowed me down).  the rest of the code was trivial.
>
>so the language that was 'not even close' brought me over $1000 in
>less than an hour. tcl/tk really is a sleeper language. 

It's been sleeping for quite a while, don't wake it up ;-)

Atually, I know that EDA companies use Tcl/Tk for many of their GUI 
needs.  We're talking about software that sells for up to $200,000/seat 
in some cases.  It's still pretty widely used in EDA because Ousterhout 
initially developed it for use with chip layout software.

>i'm amazed
>that it's not more popular than it is outside of comp.lang.tcl

But would you really want to do soemthing substantial in Tcl?


Phil