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http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/
A surprising number of people automate VB applications with Tcl.
TclBridge greatly eases work with VB.
kennykb writes on comp.lang.tcl:
Perhaps the best head-to-head comparison of Tcl and VB in the context of adding GUI to a legacy engineering application was written by no less a light than Brian Kernighan (co-inventor of C, among his multitude accomplishments). You can find it at: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/tcl95/kernighan.html
And Marty Backe replies:
The postscript version [of the article above] is > 11 MB. I've created a pdf version of it (~200KB) that can be gotten from here: http://www.lucidway.org/Marty/Tcl/Docs/kernighan.pdf
HJG 2005-08-30 This page asks for username & password
AMG 2005-09-02 Mirror! http://ioioio.net/tcl/kernighan.pdf . Thanks Marty for emailing me your copy; I will host it for you and everybody.
A nice Cheat Sheet for moving from VB6 to Tcl here: http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=11951&group_id=10894 RS: Hm, interesting.. but even on A4-Landscape, I can't print it decently...
LES: if that is still useful to anyone (two years later!), here [L1 ] is a remodeled page, and here [L2 ] is this remodeled page in PDF.
WJP Also, butt-ugly. There's a very nice comparison of Tcl with VB in Brian Kernighan's paper Experience with Tcl/Tk for Scientific and Engineering Visualization [L3 ] That's about as definitive as you can get. (In case you were wondering, Tcl wins.)
EKB I read Kernighan's paper with interest. It's really nice (although woefully out of date by now). It gives a balanced appraisal of several languages. But I don't think it's correct to say that "Tcl wins" out of the VB/Tcl comparison. Kernighan's own summary:
As a rough summary, for the specific purposes I have used it for, Visual Basic is significantly better than Tcl/Tk for the purely visual part (creating the interface on the screen and having it look somewhat like a commercial product), worse for programming, and extremely unsatisfac- tory for interprocess communication. Each is the easiest interface-building tool in its native environment.
Peter Newman 5 September 2005: I read Kernighan's comparison. And to me, he's bang on the money. Visual Basic really doesn't have anything over Tcl/Tk, except as regards the user interface builder - and the whole integrated development environment.
It's definitely quicker and easier to put a simple, primarily GUI, app. together with Visual Basic, than it is with Tcl/Tk.
But, it seems to me, that creating a Tk version of Visual Studio would be pretty trivial. Too much work for one person to do alone perhaps. But quite easy if broken down into nice easy little "fun weekend projects". If, say 10+ people were involved, and everyone documented their code properly, so others could easily upgrade and add to it, then it seems to me we could have something quite useful.
What's particularly nice about VB, is that you just write your code. And then press F5. At which points it create the executable, and runs it for you to test. Sweet as. Imagine if we could do that with Tcl/Tk. And end up with (say) a TclKit, Starpack, Freewrapped app., or even a Nullsoft installer type app., with no more than a button click/press.
Nothing too hard to do. All it requires is a few willing hands. And some clear top-down design, discussion and agreement on features, etc - before anyone starts coding.