Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Kevin Walzer]

On 12/30/10 12:36 PM, rantingrick wrote:
> On Dec 30, 9:51 am, Kevin Walzer<k... at codebykevin.com>  wrote:
>>
>> Tcl is not a domain-specific language for creating GUI's. Tcl is a
>> full-featured, general-purpose programming language that is a peer to
>> Python in its capabilities,
>
> Anybody can gloat and gush about their favorite programming language
> however what separates fantasy from reality is evidence of these
> "theories". Or rather, Illusions of grandeur!

You can build web servers, database tools, FTP clients, test 
suite/automation tools, chat clients, and drivers of other CLI tools 
with Tcl, just to name a few. In terms of what can be done with the 
language, I'm not aware of anything that can be done in Python that 
can't be done in Tcl.

The size of Python's community and its large standard library are an 
advantage over Tcl. While Tcl is technically capable of many things, 
it's often easier to find a Python library already coded for specific 
functions--for instance, while Tcl has XML parsing and can parse RSS, it 
doesn't have a rich library like feedparser all wrapped up and ready to go.

>
>> and surpasses Python in some respects.
>
> The only thing that Tcl has over Python is building Tk GUI's. Please
> post evidence otherwise if you dare! In the meantime i will not be
> holding my breath.

I find that Tcl's "everything is a string" representation offers a more 
flexible and expressive approach in certain contexts. Tcl's "exec" 
function makes interacting with external tools simpler than os.popen and 
subprocess--I can get the output of a command with less code.

Of course, this is partly a matter of taste.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com