[VTK ARB] TCL/TK: is it needed anymore in VTK?

[Will Schroeder]

Andrew-

I see your point and agree, I'm thinking that applications like
Slicer, which at one time had large dependencies on Tcl, would not be
happy (although this is fast changing). So if this were to occur it
would have to be staged over a very long time, probably after some of
us older guys bite the big one :-)

W

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 10:10 PM, Andrew Maclean
<andrew.amaclean at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> This is just for discussion and it was prompted by a throw-away comment by
> someone in the last VTK ARB Meeting regarding TCL.
> So:
> In the beginning ... when VTK was just a baby (and a lot of you at Kitware
> were still in primary school!), TCL was really essential and useful because
> at that time there were no other rapid development/prototyping languages
> that were cross-platform and easy to use. So at that time (late 90's early
> 2000's) TCL was really great in that you could rapidly prototype something
> and then code in C++. Yes I know that Python was around at that time but TCL
> usage was more widespread.
> Now... we have Python and using Python is really convenient because the
> transition to C++ and or Java is relatively simple.
> I know that there are still tests and examples that use TCL in the VTK tree
> but lots of these have moved to C++.
> Also if you look in wikiexamples, there are 6 tcl examples vs around 59
> python examples, 11 java and lots and lots of C++ examples. So to me this is
> saying that TCL is fading into obscurity. You could argue on
> these figures that Java is not doing so well either but good Java
> programmers can easily convert C++ to Java so I suspect Java programmers
> just use the C++ examples.
> From my own experience I have found it is far simpler to prototype in Python
> and then develop in C++. I used to use TCL (because nothing else was around
> in the old days), but switched to Python because I found that students and
> coders were more able to use Python than TCL mainly because of syntax
> issues. The main point is that the syntax of Python is modern but TCL is
> not.
> Is there a really strong reason for supporting TCL in the future?
>
> I have no issues with Java and Python and our efforts should go to
> supporting these two languages. I acknowledge that there is an Achilles heel
> in Python in that Python 3+ is different from 2.x but you can work around
> these issues and I am seeing some development now moving off 2.x to version
> 3.x. However the Python 3.x api seems to be closer to C++ than the 2.x
> versions so in the future more programmers will move to it.
> Regards
>   Andrew
> --
> ___________________________________________
> Andrew J. P. Maclean
> Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR)
> The Rose Street Building J04
> The University of Sydney  2006  NSW
> AUSTRALIA
> Ph: +61 2 9351 3283
> Fax: +61 2 9351 7474
> URL: http://www.acfr.usyd.edu.au/
> ___________________________________________
>
> _______________________________________________
> Arb mailing list
> Arb at vtk.org
> http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/arb
>
>



-- 
William J. Schroeder, PhD
Kitware, Inc.
28 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065
will.schroeder at kitware.com
http://www.kitware.com
(518) 881-4902