[KLUG Members] No perl experts out there have worked with Tk?

[Mike Slack]

Ralph M. Deal (deal@kzoo.edu) wrote:
> 
> 
> Mike Slack wrote:
> 
> > I've never used Perl/Tk.  I've never heard anyone say many good things
> > about it.
> 
> 
> That implies you've heard some negative comments, right?


The main complaint seems to be that the implementation is clunky, hard to 
use/learn.  I've not heard the same complaints about Tk alone.  So somehow 
the nice features of Tk (lightweight, easy to use/learn) seem to be lost in 
the translation to Perl.  To be honest, I've only heard a few opinions.  The 
thing is, Perl hackers usually rave about anything Perl, but in the case of 
Perl/Tk, there is more silence than usual (IMHO) from that community.


> > I have used Gtk-Perl, which works pretty nicely, though you need to be
> > able to read the Gtk+ documentation (written in C), and translate into
> > the appropriate calls in Perl.  For Perl programmers, Gtk-Perl seems
> > to have more of a future than Perl/Tk.  For the unfamiliar, Gtk+ is
> > the Gimp toolkit, which is quite popular for doing GUI C programming
> > on Linux (including of course, the Gimp itself).  There isn't really
> > any active work on the Gtk+ for Windows.
> 
> 
> perl/Tk seems to be alive in Windows but very much under development in 
> LINUX.  That may be my problem.
> 
> 
> > If you are interested in GUI/scripting in general, I think the best
> > solution is wxPython, which is a combination of Python and wxWindows.
> 
> 
> Interesting.  I am interested in GUI/scripting in general and shall 
> check out wxPython, even though I've never used python.
> 
> 
> > I've done a few significant projects with wxPython, with good success.
> > Python is much easier to use than Perl (and no, I am not an anti-Perl
> > bigot -- I actually like Perl a lot), especially for large projects,
> > and wxWindows is a very nice (free) cross platform GUI toolkit, written
> > in C++, with a Python binding.  With wxPython, you can even create
> > binaries for Linux and Windows from the same Python code, a very nice 
> > feature.  
> 
> 
> So my wife could use it her MS system, even at her office, even for/with 
> her teachers!


Yes, most definitely.


> > It's also not too hard to port the Python code to C++ if
> > you want to squeeze out the extra performance down the road.  There
> > is also a wxPerl project, though I don't think it has nearly the same
> > benefits and support as wxPython.
> 
> 
> Thanks for the warning.     Ralph

-- 
Mike Slack
mike@slacking.org
--
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't
be called research, would it?" --Albert Einstein