Re: lisp scripts

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:14:13 -0500, Dan Espen wrote:

I was happily using Perl for a GUI I wrote using Perl/GTK.
As GTK evolved, the Perl support got worse and worse.  Eventually
forcing me to move to Python/GTK.

My first shot at GUI programming on Linux was using Tcl with Tk. This was
just a bit before I discovered Python. I reworked that app to use Python
with GTK, and it worked so much better, I never went back to Tcl again.

Tk is still available for use with Python, and it still works through a
Tcl layer to get there. That can be useful for some simple jobs, in spite
of Tk’s deficiencies as a GUI toolkit.

Since then I've found the number of interfaces from Python to other
packages is just amazing.

I think there is something about the design of Python that encourages the
proliferation of such interfaces. The core language is compact (a fraction
the size of Java, for example), yet versatile enough to be specialized for
many domain-specific uses (e.g. it includes user-defined operator
overloads, which Java had to leave out).

And then there is the ctypes module, which lets you directly interface to
compiled libraries written for C or other such low-level languages, just
using pure Python code. And you can construct conveniently high-level
“Pythonic” interfaces, to make it look like the library was written for
use from Python, when it was not.

There was a time when Perl was the go-to language for this sort of thing.
I think Python won out because it managed to make the whole job easier.