Tcl and Tk had both been out for several years and the excitement about them was terrific (ok, I was excited anyway :-). I remember being quite surprised that some people felt so jazzed about Tcl that they organized the workshop. I recall that it was discussed for a LONG time (several years) before we all agreed that ok, maybe there was some good reason to come together and discuss this stuff.I don't have the specific attendance records but it was something like 65 people and included:John (of course), Mark Diekhans, Sven Delmas, Andrew Payne, Brent Welch, Don Libes, Adam Sah, George Howlett, Michael McLennan, Larry Rowe, Karl Lehenbauer, Mark Roseman, Mark Harrison, Tom Phelps, Kevin Kenny, Gerald Lester, Jim Bassich, Stephen Uhler (feel free to add more notables) - in other words, from the start many people who were central (or were to become so) to language and extension development came to that first workshop and participated in wide-ranging and provocative discussions.Amazingly, even at this first workshop, I remember we discussed objects, debuggers, and IDEs. We also discussed mechanisms for handling namespace collisions (sigh). There was not a lot of agreement on many issues. (Perhaps I forget all the things we agreed on?) But it seemed as many of these topics became recurring themes (and debates) in successive workshops.The organizers actually tried to limit the number of attendees, believing that having too many people would make the workshop less effective. Thus, all attendees were required to submit position statements or something attesting to their background and ideas. This belief and practice (however misguided) continued through several succeeding workshops.The papers were great and some of there are still memorable. I will summarize them in a later visit.Don Libes "A debugger for Tcl applications."This paper presented Don's intriguing debugger - still in use eight years later - for Tcl. A major part of the discussion focused on the difficulty of getting breakpoints right in context. Alas, there's still no really good solution short of source code instrumentation.Adam Sah and Jon Blow. "A compiler for the Tcl language."Two of John's grad students describe their experience attempting the first bytecode compiler for Tcl.George Howlett "A table geometry manager for the Tk toolkit."This layout manager was a major inspiration for the [grid] geometry manager.Michael McLennan "[incr tcl]: object-oriented programming in Tcl."This conference was the first exposure of [incr tcl] to a wide audience.Michael S Braverman. "Caste: a class system for Tcl."Dietmar Theobald. "Interfacing an object-oriented database system from Tcl."Brian C Smith, Lawrence A Rowe, and Stephen C Yen. "Tcl distributed programming."This conference was also where Tcl-DP escaped the laboratory. This extension was popular for a number of years, particularly before the [socket] command arrived with Tcl 8.0.David Richardson. "Cooperating applications through Tcl/Tk and DCE."Karl Lehenbauer, Brad Morrison and Ellyn Mustard. "NeoSoft Whiteboard: a framework for Internet-based collaboration."Mark Roseman "Tcl/Tk as a basis for groupware."John Menges and Mark Parris. "Tcl and Tk use in the artifact based collaboration system (ABC)."Andrew C Payne. "Ak: an audio toolkit for Tcl/Tk."Brian C Smith, Lawrence A Rowe, and Stephen C Yen. "A Tcl/Tk continuous media player."One effect of this paper was to convince Kevin Kenny that Tcl/Tk would work for video control - it now runs the NBC network 24x7.Scott P Hunicke-Smith and Dan Mosedale. "Tcl in a high-throughput biological lab."Raymond W. Johnson. "Autonomous knowledge agents: how agents use the Tool Command Language."Artur Brauer, Claus Lewerentz, and Thomas Lindner. "Implementing a visualization of an industrial production cell using Tcl/Tk."Gerald Lester and Jim Bassich presented a short paper about using Tcl/Tk to control Shell's Auger deep water oil production platform -- an application suite that at the time consisted of about 300K lines of Tcl/Tk.
[Anyone have URLs for the above papers, powerpoints, etc.?]Search online for "tcl93-proceedings.tar.gz" to find locations for archive of papers.
