Tcl and the Tk toolkit
by John K. Ousterhout, Jones, Ken · first published 1994
67% recommend33% neutral
The Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit, a programming environment for creating graphical user interfaces under X Windows together represent one of the most exciting innovations in X Window System programming. Because Tcl and Tk are so easy to learn, extremely powerful, and contain sophisticated features, they have dramatically reduced development time for thousands of X programmers. Written by the creator of Tcl and Tk, this book is the single authoritative resource for anyone who wants to work with this extraordinary environment. The book offers an introduction and overview of Tcl and
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Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by J. Osterhout is an old reference but very useful for getting started with the C API to Tcl including embedding an interpreter. The last 1/3rd of the book is on writing Tcl applications in C. Also…
on “Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that produces C or Java code” ↗Hey @davidw. We can hope that they might receive similar treatment as John Ousterhout's "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit" did. JOs work (including TatTT) is often held up as excellent writing as well. The second ed. of that book was updated by a group of experts w/ JOs blessing, but w/o his participation if I understand…
on “Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died” ↗John Ousterhout's Tcl and the Tk Toolkit is great and has been updated to Tcl/Tk 8.5 which is recent enough to not cause headaches. Don't think it goes into self contained executable but covers everything else very well. Edit: Just remembered…
on “Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)” ↗…interpreter in C, which I then used as an embedded extension language in a couple of apps I was working on at the time. This was on a VAX, and rather before I'd ever heard of anything like TCL/TK. "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit", by John Ousterhout, which (among other things) explained how an embedded extension language ought to work. The O'Reilly X Windows books, and various O'Reilly books with animals on the cover. They…
on “Ask HN: Writing an Interpreter in Go or Crafting Interpreters?” ↗…I've recommended it to people who don't even own VWs. It deserves to be recognized in the same discussions as The C Programming Language, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, and the 1st ed. of Tcl and the Tk Toolkit.
on “VW Beetle Owner's Manual (1970)” ↗…common to just dismiss concerns without addressing them. That's human nature. I used to put a lot of effort into Tcl, including revamping John Ousterhout's book: http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit... But Tcl became increasingly untenable commercially, and a number of years ago I jumped into Ruby on Rails quite enthusiastically. It does things mostly the 'right' way in my opinion. However, while…
on “Haskell in Production: The good, the bad, and the ugly” ↗How does that book compare to the third edition of Ousterhout's _Tcl and the Tk Toolkit_? (other than that Ousterhout also covers Tk, obviously)
on “Tcl/Tk Spline Editor” ↗Well... not quite, but I was involved in getting one published and wrote some of it: http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit... It has left something of a bitter taste in my mouth though... I've made an order of magnitude more money from this article that took my a few hours to put together: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode…
on “Ask HN: Have you written a book?” ↗…time and effort on critiquing and improving the technical content. gulp. I hope I didn't come across too badly. My portion of the book was about Tcl's C API. 1) http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit...
on “An inteview with Brian Kernighan, co-developer of AWK and AMPL” ↗…aspect, sure. But in the wider world, writing a book can be a spectacularly bad way to invest your time. I've made way more money from my "Slicehost vs Linode" article than I have from my portion of "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, 2nd edition", even though the latter required a ton of hard work.
on “What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?” ↗…amount of active development, and anything that widely used doesn't just up and go away from one day to the next. They even published a new Tcl book recently:-) http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit...
on “ An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl” ↗Too much to not mention: davidw, antirez, and Richard Hipp (SQLite) are all current or former heavy hitters in the Tcl world. David contributed to the second ed. of Tcl and the Tk Toolkit[0], co-authored Rivet[1] (an Apache httpd Tcl module), among other things. antirez wrote Tcl the Misunderstood[2] and Jim[3], a lighter weight Tcl implementation, and Richard (drh) is a former Tcl Core…
on “Redis Turns 10 – How it started with a single post on Hacker News” ↗