Tcl on Slashdot (a little bit)

[gersoo]

Hello,

There is a little discussion about Tcl on Slashdot:

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/08/03/04/0345213.shtml

GS

[Neil Madden]

With the typical level of enlightened Slashdot response...

-- Neil

[Alexandre Ferrieux]

:-)

Yes: and I really wonder what is meant by

"Tcl with its confused mixture of command line style shell script and
C syntax"

Of course Tcl is sh on steroids. But I fail to see any link with C --
maybe the presence of braces ?
Many languages do mix styles (Python, Ruby, even L), but not Tcl...

-Alex

[Colin Macleod]

There's one very intriguing comment at
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=474514&cid=22635950
claiming that Sun dropped Tcl for Java because Gosling gave them more
control than J.O. would agree to. I wonder if that's true, anyone
know?

[Kevin Kenny]

I was somewhat on the outside at the time, but as a heavy Tcl user,
I at least heard some of the stories as drunken ramblings in hotel
bars. The general impression that I gather is that John's vision
was a two-tier architecture similar to what Microsoft had at the time.
Microsoft had Visual Basic for a scripting language, and Visual C++
for a systems programming language. John's vision was that Sun should
layer Tcl (TclBlend, Jacl) as a scripting tier atop the systems
programming tier provided by Java. Sun's marketeers feared that a
two-tier position would dilute the Java message - Java was being
touted as a one-size-fits-all solution for all programming - and
therefore took the approach that Java should be used for applications
from top to bottom. With no room left for Tcl in this architecture,
Sun and John agreed to part company.

I gloss over a good deal of other politics. There were, as there
often are, some rather strong personalities involved. Not having been
directly involved, I would rather defer to those that were to
expand on the story if they choose, or respect their silence if
that is their choice.

--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

[suchenwi]

On 5 Mrz., 23:02, Alexandre Ferrieux <alexandre.ferri...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Yes: and I really wonder what is meant by
>
>  "Tcl with its confused mixture of command line style shell script and
> C syntax"
>
> Of course Tcl is sh on steroids. But I fail to see any link with C --
> maybe the presence of braces ?

Tcl influences from C include:
- expr syntax (operators, up to a?b:c; f($x,$y) syntax)
- control structures if, for, while; continue, break
- file functions as in stdlib, just strip the leading "f": open,
close, read, puts, gets, seek, tell; stdin/out/err
- the [format] "little language" is sprintf

More is discussed on http://wiki.tcl.tk/985