
TclSqueak – IDE for Tcl - dmux
http://www.xdobry.de/tclsqueak/
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hoistbypetard
I looked at the screenshot and thought "that's a nice, warm, fuzzy reminder of
the late 90s state of the art."

Then I scrolled down and saw the first bullet: "modern UI"

I don't do much with tcl, but if I wanted an IDE for it that felt modern, I'd
probably look at Komodo first:

[https://www.activestate.com/products/komodo-
ide/](https://www.activestate.com/products/komodo-ide/)

~~~
fithisux
This is not cheap.

~~~
hoistbypetard
I thought they'd made it available free-of-charge now. (That's the only reason
I mentioned it here.)

That said, the only times anyone has ever asked me to work on large enough
projects involving Tcl that I care if I have an IDE, I've been integrating
very expensive, very proprietary software. I don't enjoy that work, my fees
for that are high, and no one's ever flinched at the cost of the IDE in that
context.

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_asummers
I'm of the opinion no one should be writing new IDEs anymore for languages and
should instead be writing good language servers for the language server
protocol (and it's debugging friends). The duplication of effort for each IDE
+ language pair is just too large.

~~~
badsectoracula
This creates an issue where the LSP is the bottleneck between what the
language can express and what functionality the IDE can provide.

For example there is absolutely no way anything based on LSP can provide the
same level of integration as what Lazarus has for Free Pascal and its LCL
framework.

(also LSP essentially working by running a server locally that has to parse
and emit JSON messages and an editor that also has to connect to a local
server and parse and emit JSON messages is not exactly ideal when you care
about keeping things simple and performant)

~~~
kps
As far as I can tell, LSP can't even distinguish between a read and a write —
it's not as useful as cscope 30 years ago.

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shanemhansen
This looks like a delightful environment. I'm going to put it on my list of
things to try out.

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sedatk
What's the use case of TCL nowadays? I thought the language was fading out due
to emergence of alternatives like Lua and Python, despite how much I love it.

~~~
lmm
It's still lighter and easier to embed than Python. Lua has sort of displaced
it for "script" files but not so much for "config" files, as artificial as
that distinction is; also I'm not sure how much Lua has caught on as an
interactive embedded prompt. And in any case a lot of existing systems feel no
need to migrate.

And honestly it's still a pretty nice language, as much as I've mostly lost
interest in untyped languages. I've been thinking about trying to implement it
(or a cut-down version) on GraalVM.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
So actually this is one thing I found when embedding Lua recently in a project
was that it doesn't really have a REPL. There's projects to add one, but it is
not as eval-loop friendly as a scheme or a Tcl.

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WesBrownSQL
Last commit was 5 years ago...

~~~
sitkack
It must have reached perfection.

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forgotpwd16
In what way the "inspired by Smalltalk programming environments" makes it
different than other development environments?

~~~
dmux
Nearly everything in Tcl can be inspected at runtime: the source code for
procedures (and their arguments), classes that have been defined, methods,
etc. Tcl can be made to appear as if it was "image" based rather than file
based. This project taps into that.

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AbuAssar
I suggest writing extensions for vscode to provide tcl language server and
debug server.

~~~
zentiggr
VScode seems like the MVP of IDEs to add support to. I'd go for community IDEA

