Tcl/tk vs. the web
I&#x27;ve got nothing against Tcl&#x2F;Tk. I built my current company&#x27;s first website with OpenACS and AOLServer, and everything was built in Tcl. I have no major complaints about the language or about Tk (I&#x27;ve also built some trinkets with Python+Tk and Perl+Tk over the years). But...that ship has sailed, about 15 years ago.<p>And, I can&#x27;t argue with the &quot;JavaScript burnout&quot; problem. I&#x27;m currently trying to sort out the front end for our UI rewrite, considering things like React. There&#x27;s an incredible wordsoup of jargon and new tools to learn, no established best practices (we&#x27;re in the wild west phase of web UI development, with a thousand competing and occasionally interacting technologies), and no unified way to build a user interface in HTML+JavaScript.<p>I mean, I can understand someone looking at how bloody simple it is to put a window with a widget on the screen with Tcl&#x2F;Tk (or almost any other reasonable UI toolkit, for that matter), vs. the huge pile of crud one has to install and poke at to do the same for a browser in a modern way (i.e. without reloading the page every time something changes state, for example), and throwing their hands in the air and saying, &quot;Fuck this! I&#x27;m going back to...whatever I was using before.&quot; Things have gotten so baroque in the web development space, it can seem impossible to look at a new project and have any clue what&#x27;s going on (because you have to know all of the frameworks and libraries and transpilers it uses, the tooling it uses like Webpack, SASS&#x2F;LESS, etc., plus the basics of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript).<p>And, obviously, I can&#x27;t tell anyone not to give up on the web and build traditional desktop applications. But, if you want your software to be <i>used</i> by real people, it&#x27;s almost always going to need to be on the web. And, that will become more true over time, rather than less true.<p>I find desktop apps charming, but even my stubbornness has run its course. I haven&#x27;t started seriously using a new desktop application in maybe five years (Mixxx DJ software is the most recent thing I can think of). Even for things that a desktop app ought to do better...like email, there are now better web applications for the task, and I find myself using the web more than the desktop programs for almost everything.