History

Where Tcl/Tk, tkinter and Tktable come from. For how pytktable came to be, see this blog post.

Tcl/Tk

Tcl (Tool Command Language) is a programming language designed by John Ousterhout, which first appeared in 1988[1]. Tk is its GUI toolkit, which Ousterhout also created: he started it in late 1988 and first released it publicly in 1991[2]. Tcl is mainly known for Tk, so people often write Tcl/Tk.

tkinter

Python’s tkinter, which stands for Tk interface, is a wrapper around Tk. It was written by Steen Lumholt and Guido van Rossum, and in June 1994 Guido van Rossum already announced a new version of it, so it’s at least from 1994[3]. Python itself is older: Guido van Rossum started it in December 1989 and first released it in February 1991[4].

tkinter has no table widget, which is why this library exists.

Tktable

The Tcl/Tk Tktable widget was originally created by Roland King, who released its first version in 1994, as a table widget for Tk[5]. Jeffrey Hobbs then took it over, released version 1.0 in 1996[6] and maintained it for many years, so it’s mostly known as his work.

The first version on SourceForge is 1.82, from 1998[7], and the latest one there, 2.10, is from November 2008[8]. Today, bohagan1/TkTable, by Brian O’Hagan, continues it, and pytktable-binaries is built from its releases.

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[1]

See Tcl on Wikipedia and the Tcl chronology on the Tcler’s wiki, which says that Ousterhout first used Tcl in 1988 and presented it at the USENIX conference in 1990.

[2]

According to the Tcl chronology, Ousterhout began Tk in late 1988 and presented it in 1991.

[3]

The tkinter documentation of Python 3.9 says “Tkinter was written by Steen Lumholt and Guido van Rossum”, and in his post of 1994/06/28 Guido van Rossum announces “a new version of Steen Lumholt’s Tk interface”.

[4]

See Why was Python created in the first place? in Python’s FAQ: Guido van Rossum started it during the 1989 Christmas holidays and posted it to USENET in February 1991.

[5]

Roland King’s first release is dated 1994/09/22 in the history of Tktable, imported from the original SourceForge CVS repository into bohagan1/TkTable, whose README still says “Conceptually based on Tk3 table widget by Roland King”.

[6]

tkTable v1.0 is dated 1996/12/19 and was committed by Jeffrey Hobbs. The README says “Copyright 1997-2002, Jeffrey Hobbs”.

[7]

The tktable-1-82-0 tag is dated 1998/04/03.

[8]

The tktable-2-10-0 tag is dated 2008/11/15.