[HN Gopher] Wapp - A Web-Application Framework for Tcl
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       Wapp - A Web-Application Framework for Tcl
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 82 points
       Date   : 2021-06-11 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (wapp.tcl.tk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (wapp.tcl.tk)
        
       | bogwog wrote:
       | Cardi B's favorite framework
        
         | cheschire wrote:
         | You mean her song about wireless access points?
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PlLRUoSukk
        
         | catwind7 wrote:
         | mixed feelings about this not being the top comment
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | talkinghead wrote:
       | i feel like a good business idea would be showing new product
       | names / logos to a group of 50 people from various demographics
       | and ages to see if the name clashes with something else.
       | 
       | bc this one quite quite funny
        
         | PedroBatista wrote:
         | I'm sure pretty much every word clashes with something and is
         | "quite funny" at some point in time, and that's not even
         | considering other idioms.
         | 
         | Better just call it whatever you find OK at the time ( minus
         | the legal stuff ).
         | 
         | Btw, having a framework called Wet Ass PussPuss -> (,)++ for
         | short it's pretty cool.
        
         | canadianfella wrote:
         | "WOP" and "Wapp" are as different from each other as as "can't"
         | and "cunt".
        
         | dqv wrote:
         | There's some... apps on this server
        
           | badesalz wrote:
           | certified geek seven days a week
        
             | tekromancr wrote:
             | Tcl on the web; That's a Wapp
        
             | dqv wrote:
             | In all seriousness, I don't think there is much overlap in
             | people who know about Wapp and those who know about WAP.
        
               | tekromancr wrote:
               | I don't think it would be hard to imagine people would be
               | aware of an VERY RECENT INCREDIBLY POPULAR song.
               | 
               | Just because you like web shit doesn't mean you are
               | completely disconnected from the greater culture.
        
               | SQLite wrote:
               | I am the developer of Wapp. I gather (from other
               | comments) that the name "Wapp" collides with a recent pop
               | song by someone named "Cardi B" - please correct me if I
               | have misunderstood. For the record:                 *  I
               | do not follow or participate in pop culture.       *  I
               | do not listen to pop music, ever.       *  I do not know
               | who Cardi B is.
               | 
               | Any similarity in the name of the Wapp software framework
               | and music by the individual or group known as "Cardi B"
               | is purely coincidental.
        
               | lhorie wrote:
               | Yes, Cardi B is a female singer who is popular these days
               | (as in, she's on the radio). WAP the song name is an
               | abbreviation that refers to female genitalia.
               | 
               | That people associate "Wapp" with a sexually suggestive
               | pop song name instead of "app" or "web app" might say
               | more about them than anything inherent from the project
               | name...
        
               | cortesoft wrote:
               | Well, all these people commenting know both. I have a
               | feeling a majority of people who know about Wapp know
               | WAP, just because of the latter's overall popularity.
        
               | scrozier wrote:
               | I suspect you're wrong. :-)
        
             | ht85 wrote:
             | I don't cook, I don't clean
             | 
             | but let me tell you how I got this app running
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | I went to a PTA meeting once and they were playing "OPP" while
         | everyone's kindergarten age children danced to it. My wife and
         | I were pretty sure we were the only ones that knew the lyrics.
        
         | fredley wrote:
         | Yeah, imagine the name of your product sounding like the
         | Western Australia Party!
        
         | mouldysammich wrote:
         | This project predates the song i assume you're referring to by
         | 2 or 3 years
        
           | CraigJPerry wrote:
           | It made me think of the old wireless application protocol
           | stuff - WAP. I did create a site in WML around 2002 but all i
           | remember is a <card> structure.
        
             | andylynch wrote:
             | I worked with some guys who released one of the first
             | mobile online games over WAP (it was a spin on wumpus hunt)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | kemyd wrote:
       | TCL was the first programming language I learned because it was
       | used to write scripts for IRC bots. Funny times :)
        
       | sbuttgereit wrote:
       | And of course anytime anyone mentions TCL and the web, we must
       | take a moment to remember AOLserver:
       | 
       | http://aolserver.github.io/
       | 
       | Maybe a slightly better link...
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver
        
       | gilbetron wrote:
       | I've heavily used TCL twice in my career, and while I find it an
       | interesting experiment in a language, and actually enjoy a lot of
       | it, I would never recommend it to anyone, nor would I ever pick
       | it for a project. The core idea of "everything is a string" just
       | has a lot of failure modes, and you find yourself making common
       | errors even after years of developing with it.
       | 
       | But it's a really neat exploration of a "what if" in programming
       | languages.
        
         | AndresNavarro wrote:
         | I was just thinking about this today. I am currently forcing
         | myself to work on TCL for a small project (I've only used it
         | casually before). Coming from lisp I can appreciate some
         | aspects of it, but it can be frustrating at times.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | To me, it seems fine in the space of an embedded scripting
         | language where you let end users script within your otherwise
         | "not tcl" application.
         | 
         | These days, maybe lua is a better choice, but I can see lua
         | being more intimidating for smart, but less software-
         | experienced people. "Everything is a string" might be more
         | intuitive for them.
        
         | an1sotropy wrote:
         | In the 1990s, when Tcl was taking off, there was really nothing
         | else that made it as convenient to glue together different C
         | libraries and slap a (Tk-based) GUI on it. It was a welcome
         | revelation, compared to XWindows programming.
         | 
         | In the 1990s.
        
         | jcfields wrote:
         | I haven't used Tcl for anything in ages, but I have a book on
         | it that I thumb through sometimes because it's so bizarre and
         | fun to read about.
         | 
         | For example, you can delete or rename procedures on the fly,
         | including built-in procedures. So you can rename a built-in
         | like puts to something else, create your own puts procedure,
         | and then call the old one (under its new name) in your new
         | procedure (in case you wanted to override it to do some pre- or
         | post-processing each time). You can even redefine procedures
         | within themselves.
         | 
         | You can use variables in variable names (PHP does this as
         | well).
         | 
         | The comment character # is a valid name for a variable or a
         | procedure.
         | 
         | "Everything is a string" extends to even lists and code blocks.
         | 
         | Even though we've moved away from the hyperflexibility of
         | languages like Tcl and Perl, they certainly served their
         | purpose, and a lot of their better ideas were refined in their
         | more orderly successors.
        
       | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
       | It seems like many of these commands should be methods on an OO
       | object or at least subcommands of "wapp".
        
         | jlg23 wrote:
         | What could be the benefit of dragging OO into this?
        
           | andrewshadura wrote:
           | It would be more Tclish, more similar what other Tcl packages
           | (third-party and core ones) do.
        
       | cutler wrote:
       | For TCL? But why?
        
         | edwinyzh wrote:
         | IIRC, the author of SQLite uses TCL.
        
           | bachmeier wrote:
           | He used to be a member of the core TCL development team.
        
         | rkeene2 wrote:
         | It was written by the author of SQLite, which is basically a
         | Tcl extension that escaped into the wild.
         | 
         | There's a talk by DRH at the Tcl 2019 Conference regarding Wapp
         | [0].
         | 
         | [0] https://youtu.be/Aq4NI5NTUpU time code 1:49:34
        
         | swiley wrote:
         | It has one of the only truly cross platform UI toolkits.
        
           | reflectiv wrote:
           | ok but like....thats for desktop application development...
           | 
           | ...this is the web, a completely different and totally
           | unrelated beast.
        
             | tpoindex wrote:
             | I did write a Tcl web system back in the 2000's that was
             | close to the Tk programming model, although not quite a
             | one-to-one. Here is an example of side by side programs for
             | Tk and Aejaks: https://wiki.tcl-
             | lang.org/page/%C3%86jaks+compares+to+Tcl%2F...
             | 
             | Some other screen shots:
             | http://aejaks.sourceforge.net/Screen_Shots/index.html
             | 
             | This was made with the Java based Echo toolkit, and the
             | Jtcl interpreter (Tcl implemented in Java.)
        
             | swiley wrote:
             | tk works on mobile as well.
        
               | reflectiv wrote:
               | mobile is much more akin to desktop development because
               | the API's/etc are specific to each device type
               | (android/iphone).
               | 
               | The web is a different beast from that too.
        
         | mhd wrote:
         | Tcl had a very short time in the fickle web dev spotlight,
         | mostly due to Aolserver and Philip Greenspun. Something between
         | CGI with Perl and whatever Java had to offer in the deep end of
         | the 90s.
         | 
         | At that time, a few lucky folks made way too much money using
         | weird languages for the fledgling commercial internet.
         | 
         | http://aolserver.github.io
         | 
         | https://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/
        
           | doublerabbit wrote:
           | Just throwing this out there, NaviServer is the replacement
           | to aolserver. It's in active development and pretty awesome
           | to what it can do. OpenACS is a prime example
           | 
           | https://openacs.org
           | 
           | https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/NaviServer
        
         | blacksqr wrote:
         | Yes, why on earth would someone use a tool designed to work
         | directly with text to manage a text-based document definition
         | protocol, when so many more complicated options are available?
        
         | orthoxerox wrote:
         | Because it's a likeable language. It has a small, neat syntax,
         | equally clever semantics, so people do stuff in tcl for fun.
        
           | shp0ngle wrote:
           | I used to fix some bugs in Tcl/Tk program a long time ago and
           | it was the opposite of "fun".
           | 
           | But frankly it was about 10 years ago (and the program in
           | question was ancient even back then) and I don't really
           | remember much, and if it was a fault of Tcl, Tk, or the
           | actual program.
        
             | andrewshadura wrote:
             | Tcl has this interesting property. It's closer to Lisp in
             | spirit and shell in syntax, but it also looks superficially
             | like C, being actually nothing like it. People who try to
             | program in it as if it were C usually fail and start hating
             | it, whereas people who understand its essence start liking
             | it.
             | 
             | Unfortunately, people often encounter Tcl in situations
             | where there's nobody to explain it to them, so they learn
             | it the wrong way.
        
         | fmakunbound wrote:
         | Why not?
         | 
         | Also, sometimes it seems "hacker" in Hacker News has been lost
         | and replaced with corporate group think consensus, here.
        
           | anoncake wrote:
           | "Growth Hacker News"
        
             | bdcravens wrote:
             | It's thankfully moved on from those days, but for a while
             | it was "San Francisco and some tech News"
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-11 23:01 UTC)