[wsprague]

My thoughts about Tk:

1. I think buttons with relief are easier to use, but other than that I am always surprised at how worked up people get about theming (but then I prefer a terminal based emacs...).

2. Tcl/Tk has some GREAT ideas that are not implemented anywhere else: the built-in event handler, trivial to write callbacks, and the everything is a string philosophy (which is strangely like a self-evaling lisp approach)

3. Tcl/Tk had some really bad luck. This weekend at opensqlcamp, someone asked Selena Deckleman why PostgreSQL has not had a tenth the market share as MySQL. She said (paraphrasing): in 1999 a lot of the core devs thought the internet was just a fad -- whoops... Same mistakes maybe happened with Tcl/Tk -- it was there just a little too early.

4. Tcl/Tk demands C to be a really full platform, and C is scary to a lot of the new breed of scripters.

[davidw]

Good points, but I'm not sure about the last one. There are plenty of people who use pretty much just Tcl and don't dive into C. This even surprised Ousterhout when he was still involved with things; he thought of it as a glue language when he first created it (in the late 80ies).