Tcl Core Team Interview

Gentu writes "OSNews features a nice and long-ish interview with the Tcl core development team for just about everything. " Covers a lot of ground like what they actually use Tcl for, how they came to maintaining Tcl and so forth.

Comments

What an informative table of contents!

[LeninZhiv]

From the article:

Table of contents

1. TCL/TK Interview, Part 1
2. TCL/TK Interview, Part 2
3. TCL/TK Interview, Part 3
4. TCL/TK Interview, Part 4
5. TCL/TK Interview, Part 5
6. TCL/TK Interview, Part 6

Good thing they have it all on one page with the Printer-friendly version .

Some TCL Strengths

[zapatero]

One place that TCL really shines is with async sockets. TCL makes it really easy to prototype a server. It's builtin support of the server socket [socket -server cmd ...] enables a very easy creation of an non-forking iterative server, that does surprisingly well. And is also remarkably portable between windows, Linux, and Solaris.

I've also used Python for this, but I feel that Python's asyncore is still too buggy for prime time, and also the asynchore library is slightly more complex to utilize.

Another great aspect of TCL is how easy it is to extend. I can compare directly to JNI and Python extensions. TCL by far has the easiest and cleanest extension API for C or C++.

And finally embedding an TCL interpreter into another ap, is equally easy... Hence the near ubiquitour support of TK in other scripting languages, including Python and Perl.

Opinions from experience.

Re:Your most unusual Tcl application

[kennykb]

Ohh, where to begin? Many of the most important Tcl applications are so unusual that you don't realize that Tcl is there under the hood.

Tcl runs the operator interface of Shell Oil's Auger, a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. See pictures of the rig here, and read about the system integrators here.

Don't like oil rigs? Well, it's highly unlikely that you can mod this post down without the Tcl that's built into practically every Cisco router on the planet. Read Cisco's tesimonial.

Once you've done that, go log off and watch TV. Oh yeah, did you know that the NBC network control system is a Tcl application? It is; it's been in the digital broadcast system from prototype all the way to full 24x7 operation. ComputerWorld ran an article about the project.

Science geeks will be interested that a Tcl interface is used to program the Hubble Space Telescope

Database heavies will be intrigued by the intimate role that Tcl has in Oracle Enterprise Manager.

I could go on all evening, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Some of the largest websites in the world use Tcl

[tsmoke]

Some of the largest websites in the world use Tcl as their scripting language, including AOL.com, Netscape.com, Mapquest.com and DigitalCities.com.

This is because they use AOLserver which is a massively scaleable and powerful web application server. Some of its features are:

• Multi-threaded - It's been multi-threaded since its original development in 94 or 95.
  
• Native DB API and DB connection pooling
  
• Embedded scripting language, which is Tcl, which allows for extremely fast development. It also allows for .ADP pages, like .ASP, .JSP or .PSP pages.
  

The reason Tcl is the embedded language is that AOLserver was developed in the early nineties, when Tcl was the hot new language. If the system were to be developed today, I'm sure that the developers would have chosen Python, Perl or some other more buzzword compliant language that has a strong following.

That being said, Tcl in AOLserver still rocks for developing DB backed websites. In fact, the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is a complete web toolkit for building just these kinds of sites. The Sloan School of Management at MIT recently funded the development of an open source course management system called dotLRN that is build using the OpenACS as its foundation.

So Tcl isn't just a GUI tool or a glue language. It's also a great language for web scripting!

talli