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The State of the Scripting Universe
r.jimenezz writes "Via PragDave's blog I learned of an article by Lynn Greiner on the state of scripting languages, a.k.a. scripting dynamic languages. A number of influential personalities (Guido von Rossum, Damien Conway, PragDave himself and others) were interviewed and it's interesting to see how much their opinions coincide despite being interviewed separately. A lengthy but worthwhile reading."
I always considered it a top-down kinda thing.
You'll have that sometimes...
What exactly is the point of bring up an argument from 12 years ago while a very different topic is being discussed with people who mainly don't remember the original issues? The average /.er was in diapers during TECO vs. Lisp. What was it you wanted to achieve here? If you wanted to bring this up again I think you should have provided context.
Here is an example of one of Stallman's critiques of TCL. Not sure if it is still valid or not but it isn't some nonsense issues
Tcl also has some serious design flaws (not unlike most languages, I suppose). For example, it inherits C's arithmetic semantics, leading to behavior like:
1234567890 * 1234567890 = 304084036 (Linux PC)
1234567890 * 1234567890 = 1524157875019052100 (DEC Alpha)
1234567890.0 * 1234567890.0 = 1.52527e+18 (Linux PC)
1234567890.0 * 1234567890.0 = 1.52416e+18 (DEC Alpha)
The argument in favor of correct mathematics is not simply a
beauty-contest argument, but purely in keeping with Tcl's claim to be a "Very High Level Language" (as per its appearance in the recent USENIX VHLL Symposium). If you want to abstract away the machine from the end user, it's wise to not propagate its internal word size to users trying
to build user interfaces for scientific applications!