From: larry@tweety.cs.berkeley.edu (Larry Rowe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl
Subject: Portable applications in Tcl/Tk
Date: 23 Nov 92 18:54:37 GMT
Reply-To: larry@cs.Berkeley.EDU
Organization: U.C. Berkeley EECS Dept.
NNTP-Posting-Host: tweety.cs.berkeley.edu

(Commercialization of Tcl/Tk discussion.  Skip message if you will be )
(offended by such discussion.  /larry                                 )

Interest in Tcl/Tk has been booming.  John says the USENET ratings estimate
that over 14K people are reading the newsgroup.  Of course, this estimate is
probably high, but still I'm sure that everyone perceives that traffic is up.

From a strategic computing perspective, it is clear that the development of
future GUI applications *must* run on all platforms -- i.e., MacOS, Windows,
and X.  Currently, tk runs only on X.  Several people have indicated an
interest in a window system independent tk, call this TK*.  Problem is that 
the task is probably too much for a volunteer programmer to complete in a 
reasonable amount of time.

So, it seems to me that we need a commercial company that will provide a 
supported TK*.  Problem is how to fund it.  Venture capitalists might be 
interested in funding such a company, but they want something with the 
potential to grow to $50M-$100M.  It's hard to predict how tcl/tk by itself 
will grow that large.  On the other hand, the limiting factor to its growth 
may be the lack of commercial support and TK*.

I've had experience building commercial application development tools.
I've also given thought to trying to do the tcl/tk development system
product.  The problem is that I see this as a *very* expensive development
for two reasons: 1) tcl isn't user friendly (large markets need end-user
support -- comparing tcl to hypercard, it's hard to imagine how end-users
would go for tcl) and 2) it would probably take 5-10 man-years (hence $5M)
and 2-3 years elapsed time to develop TK* and the interactive interface 
builder/development system required to be competitive.  That's a big nut 
to crack and high risk to fund.

Nevertheless, I think we should find a way to get one or more companies
going in something approaching that direction.  We already have several
public domain interface builders.  They are fine as far as they go, but they
need to do much more.  Assuming they are ok for the moment, and ignoring
the programmer-user nature of tcl, the problem to be solved is developing
TK*.  (Incidently, I think the xlib on Mac toolbox and Windows is a good 
idea.  In fact, does anyone know if Microsoft has already done the xlib on 
Windows abstraction?  I think I heard a rumor to that effect.)

So, what would it take to develop TK*?  Suppose we had one library against
which to code Mac toolbox and Windows versions.  The Software Transforms
folks in Silicon Valley claim to have such a library.  I have several
questions:

1) How many man-years would it take to port to that or an equivalent interface?
<My estimate is 3-4 man-years, which includes coding, testing,
documentation, and support.>

2) Who would be willing to fund this development.  Suppose the cost was 
$300K to get going.  If we could put together a consortium with 6 companies
each paying $50K, we might be able to do the job.

3) How much would you be willing to pay for the run-time library?
<My belief is that we must keep the cost low to encourage everyone to
use it.  My thought would be something on the order of $500 for a 
developer license and no cost for distributing applications that use it.>

As many of you know, John and I have started a company that is producing
low-cost end-user applications using tcl/tk.  I am confident that he and
I could hire the necessary people and do the product development required.
Problem is how to fund it.  

Anyone wanting to discuss these ideas at more length is invited to email
me directly (larry@cs.berkeley.edu) or call me (510-642-5117).
	Larry
p.s. If you haven't taken a look at how tcl/tk can be used effectively in
an end-user application, take a look at our presentation package Perspecta
Presents!  You can FTP a demo version from ftp.uu.net in directory 
vendor/perspecta.  In particular, you can look in the lib directory included
in the distribution for a variety of routines written in tcl.  The current
versio is 42K lines of code of which 11K are in tcl.