Re: The future of Octave

[Jonathan King]

On 11 Dec 2000 address@hidden wrote:
>
> Argh. TclTk can best be decribed as "evil" and "obsolete", and I think
> the company who did this (Scriptics, which changed the name and was
> bought) has dropped it.

No huge disagreement about Tcl, but the Tk GUI library is still a wildly
successful product, with good bindings to it available from (among others)
perl, python, scheme, haskell, and others I know I'm forgetting.  The
Perl/Tk project has also procuced a version of Tk (pTk) that is
disentangled from the tcl-ish parts.

Tcl and Tk, meanwhile, are being kept alive in the free/open software
community:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl/

(This is worth mentioning in that I thought Octave had, at one time, some
kind of sourceforge presence itself.)
 
> If a GUI is to be made, I think using gtk+ would be better - it's the
> foundation of GNOME, GNU's desktop. If taking the next step and using
> gnome, visualization could be done through bonobo.

I haven't looked at gtk+ bindings recently (I know they exist), but it
used to be that one huge advantage of the Tk approach was that it was
high-level enough to use in short-and-sweet programs.  Plus, I think it
matches fairly well with the kind of GUI projects that I suspect would be
built on top of Octave.  None of this is to say that Tk is the only way to
go, but I think that Tk has a stronger case than some people may realize.

jking



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