Well here I am going out on a limb.
I do not find tcl/tk ugly or difficult or innefficient. I am aware that large patches do take forever to load in PD. (or they can) I am not a programmer, a scripter at best. I use Tcl/tk because it is portable, has strong string tools, and is easiest, which I have used, to build GUIs in. Bulding a GUI in tcl/tk is more like building an HTML page than coding (good enough reason for most of you to hate it!) Its also slow (ugly intreptive language) but I could GREP though a 14,000 element list in a few seconds)
tcl/tk used the be the scripting counterpart to JAVA, they were developed side by side at SUN. Just aimed at different needs. I know someone wrote an entire webserver in tcl/tk (it ran the old scriptics.com) and handled thousands of hits a day.
point of the story, Tcl/Tk is not that bad, crap looking at Lisp and Scheme, Java, C++ etc at least tcl code is in english...
my 2 cents.
Ben
On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, joge . wrote:
As far as I can tell, PD and Tcl/Tk are married, and will be for the forseeable future. If you tried to replace tcl/tk with java or something, you would have replace all of the gui externs as well. I used to feel that tcl/tk was icky and had to go, but in actually learning it, I stopped caring. Any programmer who would be able to add segmentation to the connectors in a java based gui can learn to use tcl/tk well enough in a few afternoons, it really isnt that complicated. Further, if you feel really die hard about your opinion that Java is the way, why are you not using jMax? It'd gui is "prettier" and written in Java right now.
i am not die hard java by any means . its just the language that i have alot of experince with and though i would through it you there to the group for discussion . i am new to pd so i dont know to much about its base code structure . so i was curious if it was even possible to attempted a gui in java .
as for jmax , i tried to use it for a while but it is still well in it infance it appeared to me . i guess mostly in the sense that there is not to much of a use group as far as i am aware . i am subcribed to the jmax list and the activite is mostly about the software development and compilation of jMax .
thanks for the info though , i didnt mean to sound like java is the way to do every thing and that tcl/tk is evil . hehe .. with this information i think i will looked further into tcl\tk . is there a particularly good resource any one can recommend ?
thanks
joge .