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

Maintaining TCL

[TOOSuave]

I hope maintaining TCL is easier than maintaing projects written in TCL...

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...)

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.