cmacleod4

If it's too expensive to send email, why is my inbox constantly flooded with spam? Surely it should be more expensive!

Hmm, nothing in South America, Africa, India, China, Russia. :-/

Try https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Showcase .

Also https://cgicoffee.com/blog/2026/04/tcl-tk-develop-cross-plat... (takes a little time to load).

Wayland support is being worked on, aiming for release in Tk 9.2 next year.

See: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GSoC+Idea%3A+Tk+Backend+for+t...

For the full release announcements see:

https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tcl) and

https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tk).

You do if you're hosting a website on it :-)

I've been running a couple of websites* on a home machine behind a Cloudflare tunnel for 2-3 years now. The only thing I had to pay for was the DNS registration. There are limits on the traffic you can serve on their free plan, but I'm nowhere near reaching those. I don't know what an SDK would add, you just set up a web server using whatever method suits you, then configure the cloudflared to connect to that. I did find that the online dashboard could not support all the options I wanted, so I switched to using the config file method - it would have been easier if I used that method from the start.

One caveat - there is an option to inject Javascript into your pages for traffic measurement which is ON BY DEFAULT, you have to go to "Web Analytics" and turn this off if you don't want it!

* https://cmacleod.me.uk & https://newsgrouper.org

Update - current Fossil versions no longer store user passwords unencrypted as shown in the "Setting up" section of this article.

Newsgrouper is my site. It's not literally "banned", but after spending quite a bit of time studying the Online Safety Act and Ofcom's guidance, I concluded that it was just not practical to comply with its far-reaching requirements, and since I am in the UK I can't risk ignoring UK law.

I run newsgrouper.org as a hobby project. My architecture cannot support searching within article text, only by author, subject and/or date within one group at a time (or the set of groups you have subscribed to). Usenet-Rewind does support full-text search.

A classic, but somewhat dated now.

This makes no sense to me. Tcl does have a central event loop. I'm not sure what you mean by "building up a significant scaffolding" - the event system is powerful enough and flexible enough to support all kinds of uses. :-/

A remarkably comprehensive and well-written introduction to Tcl!

A remarkably comprehensive and well-written introduction to Tcl!

The target market is "power users" who want maximum functionality and don't care much about prettiness.

I used to work on some of the code behind those "clunky" screens. I would say that Bloomberg UIs generally do quite a good job of making the functionality scale - you can do basic stuff quickly with sensible defaults, but when you need more sophistication the UI lets you dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

The Bloomberg Terminal started as dedicated hardware, but it has been Windows-based software for at least 20 years. At one time a Solaris-based version was developed, but that never took off and was dropped. These days there are plenty of Linux servers running back-end code in the Bloomberg data centres, but I've not heard of any plan to support Linux on the front-end.

"The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will." Several web interfaces to Usenet exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . I operate one of these at https://newsgrouper.org/ .

Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.

The list of talks for this year's Tcl and OpenACS conference has just been published: https://openacs.km.at/ . It's all happening in Vienna, Austria, on 16 & 17 July. Registration officially closes tomorrow, but late applications are quite likely to be accepted.

As another post pointed out, AI as a field of research started about the time I was born (LLMs are another matter of course). So everything I've created has been since that time. Some of my software tools are listed at https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Colin+Macleod - no form of AI was involved in any of them.

"worst case is trying to develop some small utility like a tool to search in files using regex" - you mean something like: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/ReacTcl+example%3A+Grv ?

This will run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Tcl's starkit/starpack system makes it easy to generate a single executable file for each OS that can just be copied over and run without any installation needed.

"there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time" - Tcl/Tk does all that just fine for me.

As I said, the user interface is awkward. You need to select the "Content" checkbox when searching for Posts. E.g. to search for "deadlock" within comp.lang.tcl, start with https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co... then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".

In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.

On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.

Spam fell off drastically after Google Groups disconnected from Usenet a couple of years ago.

I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.

Nice presentation, looks like the same thing I implemented in Tcl here: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/ReacTcl :-)

I have a Tcl Improvement Proposal (TIP 676) currently being voted on which introduces an alternative compact form of calculation. The implementation uses a Pratt parser: https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/file?ci=cgm-equals-command&nam... which directly generates bytecode rather than creating a parse tree.

You might be interested in https://newsgrouper.org - my web interface to Usenet, text-only. The site is implemented in Tcl, but only needs a web browser for a client. Some Android users find it preferable to the available native clients.