Re: Obstacles for Tcl/Tk commercial application development ?

On Jan 23, 11:43 am, Bugs <d...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks for all the terrific feedback everyone.

Bugs wrote:
What obstacles are there to using Tcl/Tk for commercial application
development? Any folks here with experience in this area???
What things in particular made it a challenge to use Tcl/Tk to develop a
commercial application?

e.g. Licensing, distribution, lack of printing support, etc.

Thanks!


I surprised that no one mentioned testing. For large commercial
applications, it's absolutely necessary to be able to build and test
the application before shipping it. Commercial viability requires
begin able to repeat this process in a predictable manner while
advancing the capabilities of the product. Tcl has a fundamental
problem in that there are a large class of problems that are
undetectable unless the code is executed and for large applications it
is not feasible to exercise every combination. This is a problem for
all programming languages, but with other languages there are other
ways to test the code. Starting with things like -Wall, developers
and quality assurance engineers can identify potential problems before
any code is executed. Products like Coverity and Purify can dig
deeper into the source code and identify problems that aren't apparent
on the surface.

This doesn't mean Tcl can't be used for commercial applications, it
just means that special care must be taken during the development
process. Many of the successful deployments of Tcl applications are
clearly written and maintained by some of the worlds most talented
programmers. Large applications developed in large shops cannot
always afford or even find the necessary talent for this sort of
endeavor, that's why there are software tools for testing the code and
languages created that are testable.

Tcl's strength is in rapid development, often used for prototyping for
this reason. If it was possible to apply just a little bit of
correctness proofs to Tcl, I'm sure it would turn into a killer
programming language. Printing is solvable, this, I fear, is not.
Please, someone prove me wrong.

-Brian
(developer using tcl in a commercial product)
.

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