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
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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.
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.
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.
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.