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Comment by kingmanaz | Hacker News Reader

Banging out GUIs in Tk is a delight when contrasted with developing in whatever javascript framework is popular this hour. Tcl itself is pragmatic to an extreme; a great framework for both organizing large projects and heaping up fast primitives written in C.

Anyway, great job! I hope Little's syntactic sugar gets more people exploring Tcl/Tk. Can't wait to give it a whirl.

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You hit the nail on the head. Tcl/Tk doesn't get enough love, it's a really useful system even after all these years, it's gotten much better in terms of looks and it was always great in terms of what it could do. All Little does is make it more approachable for the 9x% of the world that prefers C, types, etc.

When people say Tk looks bad point them here: http://www.little-lang.org/gui.html

Tk can look just fine.

Have you ever had to try converting a large pile of pre-existing Tcl/Tk code to L?

Wondering how much work that would be...

It's a rewrite but it can be incremental, you can mix and match Tcl and Little code in the same file.

> Firefox vs us on Linux

That's a bit of an unfair comparison. Gtk has lots of nice themes which AFAIK Tk can't use. That dialog doesn't exist on Firefox anymore, but this is what Thunderbird's preferences look like on my machine: https://my.mixtape.moe/fggaex.png

It's true, Tk can look okay on linux, but it will still be out of place when placed side by side with Gtk and Qt apps (Qt can use Gtk themes).

Yup, that's the price you pay for having it cross platform and avoiding C++. If I were making that choice today, might lean towards Qt, but I'm not sure. Tk's widgets are really pleasant to use, the last time I looked at Qt it was a lot lower level (may have gotten better, it's been a while).

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