How Do You Do Business Apps?

Warren Postma wpostma at ztr.com
Mon Feb 28 13:45:16 UTC 2000


>One *waaaaaay* more portable than Tk (which, sadly, on the mac side is
>quite lacking). Tk is ugly, heavy, and not a lot of fun (IMHO, of
>*course*). And I, personally, wouldn't want to program it. Doesn't run on
>handhelds, either. And it violates the Squeak philospohy.

I haven't really gotten to the point where I'd say Squeak, MVC or Morphic is
a lot of fun. I think it could be fun, and that's why I'm sticking with it.
I may yet also end up learning Tk (tkinter) because at least I could get
some trivial apps to run on both Windows and Mac.

Beyond that, the parallels between Squeak/MVC/Morphic and Tcl/Tk are many:

1. ugly but have fans who are vociferous in their support, probably because
both are tightly bound to a particular language and style of programming.
2. both lack any kind of easy to use gui-builder functionality, which makes
it hard for anyone new to adopt them
3. both lack most of the more modern widget types
4. both seem to have adopted the native-look-and-feel of an X-Terminal from
the early 1980s, and neither one has been updated to be capable of 'native
look and feel' on Mac and Windows.

On the other hand, one area where Tk sure beats Squeak on is documentation.


Warren





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