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Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.

Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.

Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.

Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.

Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.

Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.

Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.

Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.

Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.

Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.

Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.

Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.

There's but one language you'll find with rigorous support of unicode to make it a non-thought, and that's tcl. Add to unicode the excellent wiki, a grammar completely defined in eleven rules, and a versatile cross-platform GUI toolkit, and you've got a language that can't be beat for a great many situations.

Suggest you to start with this page to get a glimpse of what Tcl is all about!

There's but one language you'll find with rigorous support of unicode to make it a non-thought, and that's tcl. Add to unicode the excellent wiki, a grammar completely defined in eleven rules, and a versatile cross-platform GUI toolkit, and you've got a language that can't be beat for a great many situations.

Suggest you to start with this page to get a glimpse of what Tcl is all about!

There's but one language you'll find with rigorous support of unicode to make it a non-thought, and that's tcl. Add to unicode the excellent wiki, a grammar completely defined in eleven rules, and a versatile cross-platform GUI toolkit, and you've got a language that can't be beat for a great many situations.

Suggest you to start with this page to get a glimpse of what Tcl is all about!

There's but one language you'll find with rigorous support of unicode to make it a non-thought, and that's tcl. Add to unicode the excellent wiki, a grammar completely defined in eleven rules, and a versatile cross-platform GUI toolkit, and you've got a language that can't be beat for a great many situations.

Suggest you to start with this page to get a glimpse of what Tcl is all about!

Or hv3. It's got CSS compliance that passes Acid2, 90% frame support, and no Javascript or Flash support. The only negatives are it's a little alpha-y (background tabs block the whole UI, etc.) and there's no HTTPS support. It's rather lightweight, however, and actively developed. I use it on my Thinkpad 233MHz no trouble.

I'll use elinks for GMail and my bank website because it handles HTTPS. Using plain links for regular web browsing pales in comparison. Even w3m or dillo do better than that. And, if I'm not mistaken, Lynx is only used at libraries without funding, at universities with a documentation/knowledge base system build around it, and for users with disabilities. Well, I guess you can script with it...

tcl and tclkits - they're exactly what you're describing!

Speaking of TCL, why is it that it gets so little attention? With starkits TCL has the ability to simply create a single file executable, that doesn't require a local installation of a heavy VM.

It offers the scripting abilities people seem to want, is fairly easy to learn, has a nice set of available libraries.

Why does it seem to get overlooked? To me the startkit capability puts it head and shoulders above all the other scripted/interpreted languages since for little more than a meg in size I can have, as an example, a complete webserver in a single file that only requires a file copy to install.

Back in 1994, Sun hired the core developer behind Tcl/Tk, and asked him to form a team around the language / graphical toolkit. The toolkit was very widely used and quite promising (for the time), but it languished at Sun and eventually they dumped it.

Rich.

Suggest that Linux fails to meet UNIX specifications, for example, and watch the apologies flow in.

We're sorry, but LINUX is not Unix. That's what the acronym Linux stands for.

So not, it doesn't bother us Linux apologists.

os x also comes with bash, perl, python, tcl/tk, ruby, c (c++, obj-c), and many others, which are not locked to os x.

not that applescript is a bad thing. its like a tcl(1) of the mac platform, but thats not a general purpose language. of course applescript is a really good thing if your going to use os x alot. learning the given shell and how to script it will save effort in any platform you spend that much time on. its a good lazyness that equals efficiency (and creativity)

(1) tcl stands for "tool command language" it was meant to tie together other tools easily, but ended up just being its own scripting langauge especially after tk(the graphical part) came out. applescript is also meant to tie apple apps together with the finder and aqua, and also make simple apps easy to write. (its gui shell scripting) thus serving the same purpose for more graphically oriented users. the big differnces are applescript can access mac specific stuff (like applescript hooks in cocoa / carbon apps) and tcl/tk scripts can also run on unix/linux/windows etc.

O R L Y?

Tile

No debugger. You're stuck using printf^Wputs statements.

RamDebugger

If you work around the less than ideal formatting, you can find information about dealing with serial ports here:

http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/open.htm

It's part of the core system. I recently created a coin operated internet system driven entirely with Tcl/Tk. I thought I'd have to do the serial port portion in C for speed reasons, but Tcl proved plenty fast - even a scripting language operates much, much faster than someone can shove coins into a slot.

This has been fixed in Tcl/Tk 8.5 as it uses anti-aliased fonts. It is still in beta, but feel free to try it out. http://www.tcl.tk/

I love Ruby and Python, but in the general discussion of dynamic languages, be sure to mention Tcl. Tcl was heavily supported by Sun, until Sun decided to throw its full weight behind Java. Between Sun, AOL, and several other companies over the years, the language had enough development money poured into it to make it easily in the same league as Python, Perl, Ruby, and even Java. I realize that the topic here is Ruby, but since the general discussion has drifted to dynamic languages in general, Tcl should also be mentioned. If anyone is interested in learning more, I think the best place to start is the Tcl'ers Wiki: http://wiki.tcl.tk

I love Ruby and Python, but in the general discussion of dynamic languages, be sure to mention Tcl. Tcl was heavily supported by Sun, until Sun decided to throw its full weight behind Java. Between Sun, AOL, and several other companies over the years, the language had enough development money poured into it to make it easily in the same league as Python, Perl, Ruby, and even Java. I realize that the topic here is Ruby, but since the general discussion has drifted to dynamic languages in general, Tcl should also be mentioned. If anyone is interested in learning more, I think the best place to start is the Tcl'ers Wiki: http://wiki.tcl.tk

Yeah, come on, any language has it's propoganda... Ever checked out: http://www.tcl.tk/about/audience.html/ ? And there all the develoopment was not mentioned done by software companies in the areas where companies will not disclose what they do exactly (and that's a lot more that law enforcement and intelligence, allthough that's included). Funny to see Slashdot people alwais come up with 'Web companies" to make their point that tool X is supperior to tool Y, while in fact once you get t do the really cool stuff, and get the really cool toys you can't brag about it anymore...

Maybe it's just me, but I use Tool Command Language for that one.

Eolas has sponsored a number of OSS projects using Tcl according to this article on the Tcl/Tk wiki.

There is a large ISP in the US called AOL, which runs on a web server called AOLserver, which is now open source software. The web server makes extensive use of Tcl. Many other large sites use PHP. So, you can make it scale if you want to (although this may involve mixing in some C code).

Does it scale as well as Java? Perhaps not. The point is that it's easier to get started with the scripting language, though. Your customers probably had an easier time of it getting started with scripting rather than diving into some complex, difficult to implement Java solution. In some cases, I know I wouldn't have had any customers at all if they had had to start out with C or Java rather than a scripting language, which was easy enough that they could at least implement their idea to the point where it made money - and then they could pay me to fix up their code and make it faster, more elegant, and so on.

In any case, what's interesting to me is the range of scaling - Java does pretty well if you consider the high end, but not so well at the low end. Some scripting language systems don't scale up well enough. The best things start out pretty easy and will grow with you a long way before you have to go implement the big hairy memory intensive Java thing though.

I do agree with you WRT the speed thing... JITing stuff seems to be a pretty good solution.

These are good suggestions, including the one to avoid PERL. I think that where to start depends on the person's interests. If he wants to be able to write non-trivially useful code soon, one of the scripting languages would be best. On the other hand, if he wants to understand things at a fairly low level and is interested in hardware or operating systems, C is probably the best choice.

Of the scripting languages, I suggest that Tcl deserves serious consideration. One reason is that I don't think that object-orientation is best for a beginner. OO languages are very useful for some things, but they aren't ideal for everything, and object-orientation adds complexity and additional concepts that it's best for the beginner not to have to worry about. So I recommend against languages like Python and Ruby that are obligatorily object oriented.

Tcl also has a very simple syntax which makes it easy to learn. (Ironically, I think that Tcl is harder to learn for experienced programmers, who tend to make mistakes because they falsely assume that Tcl syntax is like that of Algol-class languages.) Tcl's other big virtue is the closely associated Tk toolkit, which makes it really easy to get started writing programs with GUIs.

Finally, Tcl has a very helpful newsgroup comp.lang.tcl on which beginners' questions are welcome as well as a helpful wiki.

I'm speaking as/for a commercial developer which already has a working port on Linux of a very large and powerful app but can't release because of the license mess the linux GUI/OS is in.

Licence mess? Hmmm...

Have you looked at projects like FLTK, wxWindows, Tk from Tcl/Tk, TIX, the Adobe Source Libraries, or Mozilla's XUL and XPFE etc? It's definitely possible to develop closed-source GUI software on X11 with a range of widget sets without violating licences.

And really, if you're developing closed-source software and want the KDE look-and-feel, you can always purchase a Qt developer licence instead of opensourcing your code.

There is no one-true-widget-set which forces you to open-source your code. The closest thing to a "one-true-widget-set-for-X11", it would be Motif - and even that is free if you're developing for Linux - see OpenMotif...

Tcl (and Tk) is still hanging in there, chugging along. Some recent developments:

Tile: modern look and feel + themes for Tk: http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/

An object system for the core: http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/257.html

I think the other big thing that's still missing is to make the standard distribution 'batteries included' - we'll see if we can make that happen soon.

I love the language, in any case, it's super easy to get people started with, and if you look under the hood, it's coded very well, and has an *extensive* C API. That was what really sold me on the language - the ability to really integrate it well and easily with C code. Python's C API is good too, but I thik Tcl's is still broader.

Actually, the guy behind Eolas is pretty good to free software - mostly through his involvement in the Tcl community:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/1935

http://wiki.tcl.tk/212

So... what can we say? Software patents are still not our friends, but seeing "the little guy" beat up on Microsoft is certainly better than, say, Microsoft holding this pattent and beating up on a little guy.

Actually, the guy behind Eolas is pretty good to free software - mostly through his involvement in the Tcl community:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/1935

http://wiki.tcl.tk/212

So... what can we say? Software patents are still not our friends, but seeing "the little guy" beat up on Microsoft is certainly better than, say, Microsoft holding this pattent and beating up on a little guy.

Try TCL http://tcl.tk/"

hahahaha!

Don't forget about Ajuba! http://wiki.tcl.tk/912 - the once-formerly-new-name of TCL/TK's company website, which was a better name: Scriptics.org, which changed yet again from Ajuba, to the now much-more sensible http://www.tcl.tk/

hahahaha! Where do these OTHER geeks get all these damn stupid names from?????

hahahaha!

Don't forget about Ajuba! http://wiki.tcl.tk/912 - the once-formerly-new-name of TCL/TK's company website, which was a better name: Scriptics.org, which changed yet again from Ajuba, to the now much-more sensible http://www.tcl.tk/

hahahaha! Where do these OTHER geeks get all these damn stupid names from?????

Tcl is easy to learn, quick to bring up interesting applications, e.g.

http://wiki.tcl.tk/references/8337!

and scales from small to large applications, databases, webservers, etc.

I think Tcl is a great beginner's language because it balances a shallow learning curve with a quite a lot of power. (More than most expect before they've tried it.) Although I hardly ever program, I've dabbled in C, C++, Java, VisualBasic, and Python, but Tcl was the only language that I felt at home with. I was writing useful programs (GUI programs, even) within 2 hours of discovering its existance.

A lot of OSS folks are put off by it's blindingly simple syntax:

[command] [arguments]

But this shouldn't be an issue in a beginning programmer's class, because your aim is to teach programming, not the subtle nuances of a particular C-sytle syntax. Once they understand basic programming concepts, then show them how other programs do it. Another huge bonus is that Tcl has a very helpful and friendly community behind it. Try sending your students to comp.lang.c or some of the other communities on the net and they'll probably be discouraged from programming ever again.

It's not perfect, but it works for me. Run in the background, it will pop up a window a few minutes before events happen.

(I also use the cronjob/send email tricks ...)

iCal is not only 100% less bloated, it's also much easier to track things like to-do lists

It's pretty basic, but it does most of what I need. What it's lacking is somethign to take Outlook/Exchange events and import them automatically -- I need to write something to do that for me.

According to informed sources (http://wiki.tcl.tk/11951) a lot of Puppy Linux is done with Tcl and Tk. Reminds me to some degree of ETLinux:
http://www.prosa.it/etlinux/papers/linuxandc.en.ht ml

although of course that was aimed at much smaller targets.

Hard and soft quoting exists in lisp as well, with the choice of apostrophe or backquote.

You should never actually need to use uplevel, but it will allow you to do almost anything you could want to do with a lisp macro. Frankly, I've never met a macro of more than a couple or three lines that I didn't hate, because of the fact that they make understanding the code using more dificult than outrunning a woolly mammoth in heat.

I predict this comment lasts 12 minutes before being modded down to -1. WHY DO THE MODERATORS HATE AMERICA?

Yeah, I've been saying for years that the Web was basically a step backwards into batch processing, except that back then at least there was the concept of a real session. HTTP was designed as a stateless protocol for a reason, to avoid the overhead of keeping track of state. Tacking on kludges to keep track of state is ridiculous.

What I don't understand about this JSON is why everyone thinks that parsing Javascript is oh-so-much-faster than parsing XML. Not that I think XML is great either, mind you.

Tcl also uses script-passing for RPC, and has a plug-in for doing Tcl-script in browsers. I bet this would have been a bit cleaner using Tcl as the interchange instead of Javascript. Tcl has a well developed security model for keeping scripts like this safe. If the only reason for using something is "well, it's already built in to the browser", you're locking yourself in to an evolutionary dead-end. Well, the web browser did that to us Internet-ages (i.e. 5-10 years) ago already, but it isn't necessarily too late. Tacking on more stuff like this just digs us in deeper, though.

Network apps using Java make a whole lot more sense to me, at this point. Implement the Web browser part in Java if you must, but do scripting in "native" Java (which can be easily sandboxed). For "Web apps", use a (caching) network class loader and be done with it. If you don't need the Web browser part, it doesn't have to be there.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

Can I get any advice? Is Ruby really "more powerful than Perl and more object oriented than Python" - is this what I'm looking for, or should I put it off and learn Python first?

No, it is not more powerful than Perl. But than again, nothing is. The points is not what is more powerful per se, but rather which is more powerful in your hands and which one best fits your own brain. At this point it is extremely important to mention Parrot: "The amazing project [...] to really unite Perl and Python one day (not to mention Tcl, Scheme, Forth and Ruby, to name just a few)."

Perl, Python and Ruby, while not the only ones, are certainly the most important languages for the Parrot development. Parrot will not be considered ready until all of them are fully supported, and at this point Parrot will be their main target Virtual Machine, running each of them and allowing them to interoperate. At this point it won't matter which of those languages you personally use, because whatever you choose you will still have access to all of the libraries and module, class and object, of each of them.

Few years ago I will tell you: "go for Perl because of CPAN." Now my advice woule be: "go for whatever you please, for in few years it won't really matter. We will be able to work on the same project, write the same application. I will write my part in Perl 6, you will write yours in Ruby, someone will write in Python and another one in Scheme. We will all subclass our classes, invoke our methods, use our objects, and we will produce a single, monolithic Parrot application anyway."

Just imagine picking up some fresh, young and cutting-edge language designed weeks ago--or even designing your own language--and having every module from CPAN available at once, working just fine using your new language syntax. This is the future Perl, Python and Ruby. Interoperation instead of competition.

I think Tcl/Tk is a far better cross-platform solution than Java or Python. I'm not knocking any of them, I just think a complex program in Tcl/Tk which has to interface to C is much easier than trying to call ANSI C from Java or Python or anything else. And it gives you all the essential advantages of Python and none of the heavy typing load of Java.

The modern programmer would serve themself well by learning Tcl/Tk, a much more highly evolved form of programming.

1) Sun workstations were the primary development environment for FOSS from about 1987 till the early 1990's.

This is true, but it is not clear how much credit for this can be given to Sun.

2) How many copies of Linux and related software were dowdloaded from a "sunsite"?

Millions. I think this is probably your strongest point, as Sun indirectly (and probably knowingly) sponsored the embryonic GNU project.

3) TCL came from where?

Berkeley :-) See http://www.tcl.tk/doc/tclHistory.html

4) Java came from where?

I've got bad news for you. Java isn't Open Source. The confusion over this has created a lot of problems for Free Software, and even now Java support in Linux is quite poor.

5) NFS, as we know it, came from where?

When Sun invented NFS, they were still a small upstart Unix vendor, so the only way they could get it adopted was for other vendors to support it, and they only way they could do that was by giving it away.

Personally, I wonder if something that sucked less might not have arisen had Sun not done that.

6) RPC's, as we know them, came from where?

I think you mean Sun RPC, as there are several other RPC systems floating around that suck in different, though broadly similar, ways. Note that due to the inate suckage and insecurity of RPC, Linux systems have never used it as pervasively as Sun systems, a fact for which I am truly grateful.

As everyone else has mentioned, you missed Open Office, possibly Sun's most impressive contribution to Open Source.

I still think the most remarkable thing about Sun's contributions is that they come from a company that is so openly hostile to Free Software. It's kinda like when Microsoft inexplicably gave their fonts away, at one stroke curing the most intractable weak spot in the Linux desktop, except that Sun keep on doing it again and again.

What bothers me most in recent trends of OSS software is that software tends to grow bloated and overcomplicated.

In the days where Stallman started project GNU, toolbox model worked well. One can find that 90% of his problem can be solved by existing tools and concentrate on remaining 10%, which should be easy enough.

Now we want so called usability and consistent interfaces and thus write GUI apps on languages as low level as C!!. Even worse, we have adopted object-oriented model (but non in form of SmallTalk - in form of C++) from commertial programmers, and it makes our software even more uncomprehandable.

What we really need is ability to break such big projects as OpenOffice or Gimp into small pieces to be developed separately.

To be really free software should be understandable for average programmers.

Only person who made step in right direction was John Ouserhout, but even his creation looks a bit too complicated to allow average user make GUI which he want with same easy as terminal users 30 years ago were able to build new command line programs with original Bourne shell.

I thought it was RMS who trashed TCL. Incidentally the linked discussions warn that people will not use TCL because RMS does not like it: Reading the discussion he does seem to ahve been guility of a certain amount of exageration of its flaws.

Try the games on the Tcl'es Wiki.