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thank goodness for Tcl's maturity!

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Mark Roseman

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Feb 12, 2009, 7:19:31 AM2/12/09
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Just a hat tip to the TCT and everyone who works on the core who are
always so concerned with stability, backwards compatibility, getting
things in the right versions, etc. It's something we take for granted,
but a lot of effort goes into it.

This post inspired by noticing a shit storm in the Ruby community about
gratuitous changes and feature additions that introduce substantial
incompatibilities between point releases (e.g. 1.8.6 code not working on
1.8.7), a mindset that people should migrate as fast as possible to the
newest version (production system? what production system?).

To say nothing of stubs, tclkit, package management, ... :-)

Some things in Tcl may take a while to get into official releases, but
if that means I never have to worry about going 8.5.5 to 8.5.6, that's
okay by me.

Mark

David N. Welton

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Feb 12, 2009, 8:07:16 AM2/12/09
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> This post inspired by noticing a shit storm in the Ruby community about
> gratuitous changes and feature additions that introduce substantial
> incompatibilities between point releases (e.g. 1.8.6 code not working on
> 1.8.7), a mindset that people should migrate as fast as possible to the
> newest version (production system?  what production system?).

Heh, yeah, there's certainly no panacea. Keeping up with Rails often
feels like you just tripped and are trying to 'run it out' to regain
your balance.

There's got to be a better middle ground, though. Although, actually
I'm pretty pleased to see 8.6 shaping up relatively quickly, and a lot
of new stuff going into the core.

Sean Woods

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Feb 13, 2009, 5:36:59 AM2/13/09
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I think the key is to look at the fact the Tcl is at 8.5.6 while Ruby
is at 1.8.6. They haven't even had a version 2.0. No doubt, when Tcl
was at 1.x we were doing the same silly stuff.

Donal K. Fellows

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Feb 13, 2009, 6:35:31 AM2/13/09
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On 13 Feb, 10:36, Sean Woods <y...@etoyoc.com> wrote:
> I think the key is to look at the fact the Tcl is at 8.5.6 while Ruby
> is at 1.8.6. They haven't even had a version 2.0. No doubt, when Tcl
> was at 1.x we were doing the same silly stuff.

The first few versions went through very rapidly from what I can tell
from the 'changes' file. There wasn't much in the way of good
stability before version 3.0, which is about when useful things like
the ';' syntax came in. The '$' shortcut was earlier still
(pre-'changes').

There was no Tcl 4.0. No idea why; I didn't encounter Tcl until the
6.* series and didn't really use until 7.4 (7.4b2 to be exact, which
is a pretty narrow window :-)).

Donal.

suchenwi

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Feb 13, 2009, 6:35:51 AM2/13/09
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On 13 Feb., 11:36, Sean Woods <y...@etoyoc.com> wrote:
> I think the key is to look at the fact the Tcl is at 8.5.6 while Ruby
> is at 1.8.6. They haven't even had a version 2.0. No doubt, when Tcl
> was at 1.x we were doing the same silly stuff.

Tcl 2.1 is still available for history fans - see http://wiki.tcl.tk/6046

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