cmacleod4

This is still just the first beta release, 9.0 final is a few months away.

Are you sure? Uplevel enables various metaprogramming techniques with far less weird magic than C++ requires!

The OpenACS and Tcl/Tk Conference 2024 will take place on 11-12 July in Vienna. Registration and the call for presentations is now open.

I used to work at Bloomberg. They do use plenty of open-source software, but they also open-source some of their own work, and they do support other projects, e.g. sqlite.

I think there must be some potential for a usenet revival. The infrastructure is all still there. The binary groups are still flowing with gigabytes of piracy and porn. With some exceptions, most of the text groups are wastelands inhabited only by a few spammers and cranks. There are a few operators who try to preserve the original vision, e.g. eternal-september.org .

It's still a potentially useful discussion system, based on open and documented standards, with no greedy corporation or psychopathic billionaire in charge to run it into the ground. I really think it could be worth doing some brainstorming to try to figure out how to bring it back to life.

The thing I miss most is that usenet clients will track exactly which messages you have read, so when you come back to a long-running discussion you can immediately see what is new since you last caught-up with it, something which none of the newer online forums seem able to manage.

It really pisses me off to see Redis described as a caching system. Yes it's good for caching, but it can do far more than just that. E.g the blocking list operations can be used to make lightweight ad-hoc communication channels - I'm using this in a project just now. Loadable Lua functions mean you can embed significant application logic in Redis - I've not used this yet but I intend to soon.

When I moved to London in my 40s I was gobsmacked to find that Mornington Crescent was a real Tube station. I had always assumed it was just invented for the purpose of the game! :-o

There are exceptions. I spent 15 years as a developer at Bloomberg, which is a fairly big company, working on the software behind various financial trading plaforms. That could be intense, demanding, stressful, sometimes satisfying, sometimes frustrating, but never dull. We were organised as small teams, each responsible for some particular product or service. So you would know a lot about what your team was doing, and could easily approach any of them. Often you would need to coordinate with some other group, which I found a bit harder, but that's mainly because of my rather unsociable personality. There were company processes of course, sometimes annoying but mostly reasonable. High performance was expected and rewarded. That can be brutal if, for whatever reason, you fall behind, but if you can handle the pressure it's a great gig.

Details at https://openacs.org/conf2023/info/download/file/decentespres... and https://learn.wu.ac.at/eurotcl2023/lecturecasts/690830882?m=...

There's not a lot of commercial demand for Tcl these days. Some people, like me, find that it fits their way of thinking and find its radical minimalism liberating. Many others do not.

My current Tcl/Tk project is a usenet/web gateway. This involves a backend Tcl process (no Tk) which uses https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcllib/doc/trunk/embedded/md/tclli... to read articles from an NNTP server, and https://code.ptrcrt.ch/retcl/doc/tip/docs/index.html to cache these in Redis. Then each user gets a front-end Tcl/Tk process on the same server which reads articles etc. from the shared Redis cache and presents them in a fairly simple GUI. I use https://tktreectrl.sourceforge.net/treectrl.html to show newsgroups and article threads in tree structures. The GUI can then be used remotely in a web browser via https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/CloudTk (which is built on top of http://standard.prd.co.uk/man/tclhttpd.man).

I have no experience of imgui but I found a comparison article here: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/imgui-tk.html

Version 9.0b1 of the Tcl programming language and Tk GUI toolkit is now available. New features include general conversion to 64-bit architecture allowing very large data structures, support for the full range of unicode characters, ability to mount zip archives as virtual filesystems, etc..

The next major release Tcl 9.0 will support the full expanded unicode range, so you can properly manipulate strings containing Sanskrit, Arabic and Pile-of-Poo! Beta release coming "Real Soon Now" :-)

And the Reddit group for Tcl https://www.reddit.com/r/Tcl/ often gets lost souls asking about problems with TCL tvs or phones :-(

I remember people who worked with StoryServer saying Vignette had made a real mess of the integration with Tcl :-(

So Python now has a chance of catching up to Tcl for multithreaded performance - see https://www.hammerdb.com/blog/uncategorized/why-tcl-is-700-f... :-)

Some people have no sense of humour :-/

Make sure your knife is sharp. Let freshly-baked bread cool before attempting to slice. Wash the board after use.

Simple!??

I have a love/hate relationship with vi and all its offspring, but I use vim pretty much every day - thanks Bram!

The wiki page https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Freewrap mentions some alternatives. The most obvious alternative would be starpacks. Recently I find Christian Werner's LUCK tool - http://www.ch-werner.de/cgi-bin/luck.pl - the most convenient way to generate standalone executables from Tcl scripts.

Comdb2 is very heavily used inside Bloomberg; outside not so much.

"I can easily spin up a GUI in an hour tinkering with PyQt. Can you do the same in Tcl?"

No, it would probably take 10 minutes with Tcl/Tk ;-)

Since HPE don't seem to care about IRIX, they could get get some positive publicity by just open-sourcing it. :-/

In the nineties I was a university sysadmin. We were mostly a Sun shop but we had a handful of Indy workstations - beautiful machines.

That sounds very familiar to me. I'm now retired but in my last job I put together a simple C++ framework to do something similar. I used this in a small part of a financial trading application. Like you, I was convinced it would pay off to apply much more widely, but I found it difficult to "sell" the idea. As you say, the real payoff comes in complex situations, which simple examples don't really convey. However lots of people seem to be playing around with reactive programming now, so perhaps it's an idea whose time is coming.

Various projects and companies using Tcl are listed at https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl .

Surely this is what regular backups are for.

That's not a bug, that's a feature!

Strange, I thought all airships were big, since the gas takes up a lot of space???

(But according to the article, bigger really is better.)

Not to mention that it's "influential" mostly by providing examples of what not to do in a sane programming language :-)