Two interesting tcl posts on reddit
in [TCL]
|
Prev: Text on canvas
Next: Global hotkeys under X11
From: tom.rmadilo on 2 Apr 2010 14:50 On Apr 1, 11:18 pm, "David N. Welton" <davidnwel...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > The backwards compatibility issue is tricky, and something I hinted at > in the article that Erlang suffers from as well. Erlang had a big, > important early adopter in Ericsson, which was good because they paid > people to work on the language. It was also bad because they lost the > freedom to radically modify their language fairly early on, and so it > has some fairly odd warts that they will not be able to change > easily. Managing that is certainly tricky. "Lost the freedom to radically modify their language"? For people who love syntax, this statement may resonate. I'm not sure how you radically modify Tcl, it is perhaps the most simple from a language perspective: no hard coded syntax, no reserved words, etc. That means that users can radically modify the language/syntax however they wish. You don't need holy blessings from above. Erlang is a very interesting language, but it is also obviously designed as a switch/proxy language. It is hard to imagine this language ever evolving or radically transforming into a general purpose language. Probably the most politically correct criticism of Tcl is the so- called lack of an object system. If you define an object as something which hides/protects access to internal structure and requires an message passing interface for communication, then Tcl has many objects: interps, file/socket handles, arrays, commands, etc. The main problem is that the Tcl community didn't think it necessary to identify these things as objects. We could have gone so far as calling strings "self describing objects", or "object code", code which describes how to create an object. As I said before, the main advantage for Tcl is how certain Tcl objects are allowed to take advantage of computer resources: multiple threads, multiple processors, multiple machines and existing non-Tcl applications reachable via exec/pipe/tcp to create a larger efficient application.
From: JonoK on 3 Apr 2010 02:43 On Apr 3, 5:50 am, "tom.rmadilo" <tom.rmad...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Apr 1, 11:18 pm, "David N. Welton" <davidnwel...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > The backwards compatibility issue is tricky, and something I hinted at > > in the article that Erlang suffers from as well. Erlang had a big, > > important early adopter in Ericsson, which was good because they paid > > people to work on the language. It was also bad because they lost the > > freedom to radically modify their language fairly early on, and so it > > has some fairly odd warts that they will not be able to change > > easily. Managing that is certainly tricky. > > "Lost the freedom to radically modify their language"? > > For people who love syntax, this statement may resonate. I'm not sure > how you radically modify Tcl, it is perhaps the most simple from a > language perspective: no hard coded syntax, no reserved words, etc. > That means that users can radically modify the language/syntax however > they wish. You don't need holy blessings from above. > > Erlang is a very interesting language, but it is also obviously > designed as a switch/proxy language. It is hard to imagine this > language ever evolving or radically transforming into a general > purpose language. Well, general purpose enough to produce this: http://www.wings3d.com/
From: Alexandre Ferrieux on 3 Apr 2010 09:26 On Apr 2, 8:18 am, "David N. Welton" <davidnwel...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > This is part of what made me so curious about the situation. I still > think of Tcl as a first-rate language developed by first-rate people. > If you accept that, you have to look elsewhere, at human/marketing/ > economics factors for its declining popularity. I'm curious: what can be said of /bin/sh's "popularity" ? Is it low ? Is it declining ? IMHO, Tcl is /bin/sh "on steroids", and following its venerable ancestor in its resistance to featuritis is not a bad idea. Freezing into perfection is not dying. -Alex
From: tomk on 3 Apr 2010 17:21 On Apr 3, 6:26 am, Alexandre Ferrieux <alexandre.ferri...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Apr 2, 8:18 am, "David N. Welton" <davidnwel...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > This is part of what made me so curious about the situation. I still > > think of Tcl as a first-rate language developed by first-rate people. > > If you accept that, you have to look elsewhere, at human/marketing/ > > economics factors for its declining popularity. > > I'm curious: what can be said of /bin/sh's "popularity" ? Is it low ? > Is it declining ? > > IMHO, Tcl is /bin/sh "on steroids", and following its venerable > ancestor in its resistance to featuritis is not a bad idea. Freezing > into perfection is not dying. > > -Alex Alex, I've also had thoughts along this line (i.e. sh on steroids) but there is a problem (mentioned by David) which is the lack of a terminal on all supported platforms. I think David was spot on when he points out that for new users tcl is very unfriendly because when a copy of tcl/ tk is download (1) there isn't a terminal included with the software (a big problem on windows) and (2) there isn't a package repository where the user can go to hunt up packages. Yes, I know about the AS teapot but it has a limited set of packages and the repository client (which has no gui) doesn't really support multi-platform downloads or dependency downloading. tomk
From: pmarin on 3 Apr 2010 19:12
On Apr 3, 11:21 pm, tomk <krehbiel....(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Apr 3, 6:26 am, Alexandre Ferrieux <alexandre.ferri...(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > > On Apr 2, 8:18 am, "David N. Welton" <davidnwel...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > This is part of what made me so curious about the situation. I still > > > think of Tcl as a first-rate language developed by first-rate people. > > > If you accept that, you have to look elsewhere, at human/marketing/ > > > economics factors for its declining popularity. > > > I'm curious: what can be said of /bin/sh's "popularity" ? Is it low ? > > Is it declining ? > > > IMHO, Tcl is /bin/sh "on steroids", and following its venerable > > ancestor in its resistance to featuritis is not a bad idea. Freezing > > into perfection is not dying. > > > -Alex > > Alex, > I've also had thoughts along this line (i.e. sh on steroids) but there > is a problem (mentioned by David) which is the lack of a terminal on > all supported platforms. I think David was spot on when he points out > that for new users tcl is very unfriendly because when a copy of tcl/ > tk is download (1) there isn't a terminal included with the software > (a big problem on windows) and (2) there isn't a package repository > where the user can go to hunt up packages. Yes, I know about the AS > teapot but it has a limited set of packages and the repository client > (which has no gui) doesn't really support multi-platform downloads or > dependency downloading. > tomk If for "lack of a terminal" you mean readline, I use rlfe. rlwrap is another. |