Progress Report tcl/tk

[Joel Hammer]

Well, it has been about 2 1/2 weeks since I decided to try
out tcl/tk. Just thought I would take a break from fiddling
with widgets to let folks know what I have found out.

I have finally gotten "over the hump." Things now
are going well, and I can make nice looking menus and
all. The main problem is finding simple documentation for
tk. tcl is straightforward for anybody with programming
experience. Simple instruction in tk would have saved
me many hours of frustration, but, this is a common
complaint. One thing one learns when trying something new
in linux is that the newbies have a hard time of it in
linuxland. Be kind.

The Welch book 3rd edition is just not well written,
IMHO. You have to work to find things. This may also be
in part a problem with using an online version of a book
meant to be used as a hard copy.

The active tcl and tk documentation is a great help,
indispensable.

There are various on line places offering hints and
recipes, which help a bit, but not until you have a
grounding in tcl/tk.

So, if you want a neat way of creating menus and
interactive buttons, and want a program which will run
in the background monitoring whatever, tcl/tk is a nice
choice. Tcl plays nicely with named pipes.

The main drawback of tcl/tk is that it may be going
obsolete. For example, I notice that my new moneydance
program has a python interface.

Joel