[harry8]

Tcl/Tk is cool.

Tcl/Tk makes UI's that jar in an ugly, immediately recognisable as "old-fashioned" way. This matters to users whether we like it or not. It would be a very niche commercial software project that used it for its UI no matter how beautifully elegant the functionality of its UI. Best ever UI will still elicit an "Ew, yuk." From the majority of its users.

Graphical UIs have been de rigeur for what, 30+ years? We still suck at the tools to program them which are all a pain in the backside to use even when making something very simple and expected. We still suck at programming these UIs when we use them. All of them. I have no answers to this.

[badsectoracula]

AC3D[0] is a 3D mesh editor that uses Tcl/Tk for the UI with the core functionality being in C. The "ttk" subset of controls is themable and AC3D has its own theme[1] which, at least to me, it doesn't look that different from the themes of other 3D software. Though it also allows you to edit and create your own themes and personally i made this[2] which i like better (though i think the people who belong in that "majority of users" group you imagine are more likely to elicit that "Ew, yuk." from my theme :-P).

[0] http://www.inivis.com/

[1] https://i.imgur.com/BgALLkH.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/uQcOa6J.png

[jhbadger]

I remember 20 years ago that half of Linux GUI apps were Tcl/Tk. Yes, people made fun of them for not being "native", but I'd much prefer a Tcl/Tk app over a modern Electron one.

[harry8]

I hear you. Don't you think it's a shame that in 20 years we haven't got anything that is actually better? Easier to program? Easier to design for usability? Better looking? I would have guessed we would have. Delphi/kylix, VB, gtk+, qt, win-whatever, mac-whatever, wx, electron. All of them. Not really the thing huh?

[wduquette]

It's quite possible to make attractive GUIs in Tcl/Tk if you're willing to put in the effort and have some design sense.

It's also really easy to create truly ugly (but functional) GUIs in Tcl/Tk.

[hulitu]

> Tcl/Tk makes UI's that jar in an ugly, immediately recognisable as "old-fashioned" way.

Yes, and they are thousand time more usable that the "modern" crap.

GUI design is going backwards since 10 years.

[harry8]

survivor bias. Nothing magical about tcl/tk (cool as it is) that makes guis more usable, sadly. Nothing in modern gui libraries that prevents good usability design either.

Guis have always been more discoverable and just better for certain tasks, usually where you want to see something with immediate updatable feedback but the gui libraries have always been terrible. They were terrible 30 years ago, and 20 and 10 and still today.

I don't have answers.

[badsectoracula]

WRT what hulitu refers to (as i understand it), it isn't Tcl/Tk that makes the GUIs more usable, it is more that the modern trends that largely came out of small touch screens and often use flat(ish) themes with a lot of padding and unused screen real estate that make desktop applications less usable.

Tcl/Tk just makes it harder (though not impossible) to make such GUIs because its defaults were made before those trends, but it isn't unique to it - the same applies, e.g., to applications made with Qt Widgets. Note that here i do not refer to how easy it is to make the GUI, just on how usable applications are from a desktop user's perspective when using the default look and feel.

This particular problem is largely a matter of trends - some libraries/technologies make it easy to follow those trends, others harder, however the root issue isn't so much the libraries/technologies in question but the trends themselves.