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

Pass-by-name is still cool

[ObviousGuy]

With the rest of computing going off in the direction of pass-by-reference, it's kind of refreshing to see some languages sticking to their antiquated guns and pushing pass-by-name.

It's kind of a forgotten art, but P-B-N makes some things like recursion and package scoping very very easy.

Re:Pass-by-name is still cool

[Inode Jones]

Actually, Tcl can use pass-by-reference if you want it to. Tcl objects are dual-ported: they have an internal representation and a string representation. If you define your own representations, you can have the Tcl objects point directly to your internal structures without any need to do name lookups. This is VERY fast, especially if name lookups are expensive.

Tcl does not suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Tcl is a language that has a only one syntax for every kind of operation. It has only one data type, though under the hood it stores data that you use as, say, an integer, appropriately. The 'if' statement, rather than being a special construct, is just another procedure which happens to take code to be evaluated as one of its textual arguments. There are no exceptions to the syntax, which makes it easier to understand. It happens to be the opposite of Perl's "natural language" approach, but - so what! It also, much like Perl, has a huge potential for unreadable code, but so does every language.

Most people who hate Tcl just base their opinions on hearsay. I only respect the views of those who actually have maintained code.

It is easy, ecstatically so, to write organized, well-performing Tcl applications at any capacity. This is also true of Perl or even C++ (if you have a high pain threshold). That is to say, C++'s approach to simplicity and readability - if I dare assert that it has one at all - is being a low-level language, which keeps you in touch with the entire process on a byte-by-byte level, so it's never a challenge to understand what's going on under the hood. Perl's Way is to act like a natural language, so reading it taps into our inherent linguistic talents. And Tcl's is to just have an extraordinarily simple syntax - and in my opinion, it works.

The hysterical anti-Tcl sentiment is unfounded. My reply to one of these Tcl trolls on Everything2 goes into more detail: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1325568

(I'd be in under my normal account, but I can't retrieve my old password)

TCL in real life

[dmayle]

<Shameless Plug>Check out TPOP!</Shameless Plug> It's a POP mail client written entirely in TCL (by me) for the Tivo. (Tivo is heavily dependant on TCL for its functionality...)

TCL vs TK / Ousterhout bailing/ maintaining code

[CresentCityRon]

At the 1998 Usenix convention in New Orleans Ousterhout asked how many people used TCL w/o TK. Few raised their hands. Then he asked how many used both. Most raised their hands! Finally he asked about just TK users. Far more raised their hands than the just TCL crowd. He was surprised. He seemed to feel that TK was an addon. For a number of developers that I know and myself TK was the glitz and feature that drew me in. Otherwise I would have stuck with Perl.

With Ousterhout looking for greener pastures does this weaken the product? I would think so. If he doesn't believe in it then why should I? How long as he been gone. I couldn't tell exactly from the interview. If I missed it sorry.

I don't know about anyone else but I get in a "TCL" frame of mind. If I go off and do some C++ or Perl coding I cannot seem to read TCL code for a bit. I have to "warm up" or something. I'm aware of flaws in other languages - Perl syntax for example - but you can get some nasty TCL bugs that will simply doom you. It IS tricky at times.

I feel that TCL's strength was it was an early tool that worked across platforms, and was great for X GUIs. Today that is much more common among tools.

-Ron
PS: Ousterhout AND Welch used to reply to my questions years ago. They were terribly generous with their time answering emails. It kept me working with the tool.

Re:Maintaining TCL

[hobbs]

Tcl's C source code is some of the most beautiful I have ever seen.

As a lead maintainer, I have to of course agree, but it is an interesting note that Tcl/Tk is the only major scripting language that has won ACM's Software System award. It's a level of code cleanliness that many systems just dream of.

What is wrong with a minimal core language?

[patthoyts]

A number of the comments above revolve around Tcl's percieved lack of a standard object system. There is one, it's called [incr Tcl]. There are also a large number of other object systems many that fit naturally into the system for which they have been designed. I see no reason to insist on incorporating any object system into the core language. Much better to keep the basics small and compact and allow extension. The now standard Tcl distribution from ActiveState supplies all the bells and whistles you might need. But if you want a minimal system, you need go no further than the tcl sourceforge project and obtain just the language core. I would favour making the language more modular. Not less. Get the TCP sockets out into a loadable module. Chop out the regexp engine. This way if your intention is to drive a washing machine without internet access, you can use only the pieces you need. I've yet to meet another language that is as easy to extend with compiled modules as Tcl. Minimalism - it's the way forward.