Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Birth of Tcl

tcl.tk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 105 posts

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#51

Post by jrapdx3 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #21

Interesting to read how Expect came so soon out of TCL (TCL: 1988, Expect: 1990) Expect remains an essential tool for dealing with interactive (but not TUI) terminal application, and in usage really fits its TCL roots perfectly. In contrast, I've found the Perl and Python ports of Expect to be somewhat awkward, not fitting those languages paradigms as well. In the 2020s, I still think Expect is TCL's killer app.

Expect has had remarkable longevity, though I'd say the greatest impact of Tcl has been though *sqlite* which started as a Tcl extension and still uses Tcl in its development. Sqlite is used so very widely, hard to find any major software that doesn't incorporate it. I guess Tcl is nearly everywhere, under the hood anyway.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#52

Post by timbit42 »

johnisgood wrote: post #15

Tcl and Rebol are great. The code is compact, very easy to understand and quick to write, especially Rebol. You can do GUI in both Tcl/Tk and Rebol as well. You might want to check Rebol out as well: http://www.rebol.com/docs/expert-intro.html (or http://www.rebol.com/docs/design-objectives.html ).

Rebol was created by Carl Sassenrath who wrote the Amiga OS and put pre-emptive multi-tasking in it.

After he left Commodore he wrote Amiga Logo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#53

Post by nomel »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #21

Interesting to read how Expect came so soon out of TCL (TCL: 1988, Expect: 1990) Expect remains an essential tool for dealing with interactive (but not TUI) terminal application, and in usage really fits its TCL roots perfectly. In contrast, I've found the Perl and Python ports of Expect to be somewhat awkward, not fitting those languages paradigms as well. In the 2020s, I still think Expect is TCL's killer app.

I think expect is a result of having no programatic interface for command line tools. I ofter wonder how much more useful these command line tools, and how many hundreds of man years would have been saved with buggy text parsers, if there was a programatic stdin/stdout, in addition to the one for humans, from the beginning.

But, with the reality we live in, expect helped me many times in the past. These days, I use python's pexpect for the same use cases.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#54

Post by rcurry »

jgrahamc wrote: post #29
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #27

The article doesn't discuss how Sun turned away from Tcl and embraced Java instead (understandable since it focuses on Tcl). It's interesting because Sun had the same goals for Tcl as they did for Java (or vice-versa!): " evolve Tcl into a universal scripting language for the Internet ", " allows untrusted scripts to be evaluated safely ", " Tcl plugin, so that Tcl scripts can be evaluated in a Web browser ". Ousterh…

I was the VP of Engineering of Ousterhout's spinout company, Scriptics, and worked for him. I don't know the story of how Sun made the decision but John has a longer History of Tcl here: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php "At the same time, it became clear that Sun needed to focus its language evangelism around Java, which was released shortly after I arrived at Sun and had become hugely popular.…

I got exposed to TCL/TK while working for a National Lab a long time ago. At the time I was a hardcore C++ developer and after a week or two with TCL/Tk I was almost dying laughing about how easy it was to build really cool applications. I truly miss working with that platform.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#55

Post by jrapdx3 »

johnisgood wrote: post #42
jrapdx3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably already are aware of it but there's an effort to create an open source successor to Rebol. See the Red Programming Language site [0]. I've played around with Red and it's pretty interesting. Though rather different from Tcl. Red compiles to native code out of the box which is an advantage. Currently Red is limited to 32-bit output. When they get 64-bit working along with self-hosting compiler I think the…

I know about Red. Unfortunately it requires 32-bit libraries, whereas Rebol 3 does not. I could not get Red to work as easily and nicely as I did get Rebol 3. :/ > When they get 64-bit working along with self-hosting compiler I think the language could become a major success. I agree. I will most likely switch to it (though I have not dig'd deeper, hopefully it follows the philosophy of Rebol). I will check if my Reb…

Thanks, didn't know about the Rebol3 version in the link. I'll have to look into it. AFAIK the Red developers goal is to extend the Rebol philosophy to a modern, open source tool that can serve a number of high and low level purposes. Red is coming along but slowly. Not surprising given the lofty ambitions of the project. I too hope they succeed.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#56

Post by tpoindex »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #23

> The Tcl Conference is also one of the world's premier events for upper body wear: each year there are 5-10 different T-shirt designs given away to recognize various extensions, events, etc. That's funny. Is there a gallery collecting these?

I collected many of the T-shirts and other items. I published a list w/ photos, including a few photos others sent me. All done in glorious bare-bones 1990's HTML, photos taken on 35mm and scanned with a cheap scanner.

https://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/tcl-wear/

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#57

Post by johnisgood »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #55
johnisgood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know about Red. Unfortunately it requires 32-bit libraries, whereas Rebol 3 does not. I could not get Red to work as easily and nicely as I did get Rebol 3. :/ > When they get 64-bit working along with self-hosting compiler I think the language could become a major success. I agree. I will most likely switch to it (though I have not dig'd deeper, hopefully it follows the philosophy of Rebol). I will check if my Reb…

Thanks, didn't know about the Rebol3 version in the link. I'll have to look into it. AFAIK the Red developers goal is to extend the Rebol philosophy to a modern, open source tool that can serve a number of high and low level purposes. Red is coming along but slowly. Not surprising given the lofty ambitions of the project. I too hope they succeed.

You should definitely give it a go! This is the SO post I mentioned, for what it is worth: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31510930/rebol3-what-is-...

It was very easy to get Oldes' Rebol 3 up and running. It works. There are many extensions as well. My only problem is the lack of GUI (a huge problem, to be honest, because I want to contrast it to Tcl/Tk which I love as well), or at least I have not found the way to make it work. I might be doing something wrong though, or I might be missing something. I have not had enough time to search it up and get it to work.

Anyone who knows how to get GUI to work with Oldes' Rebol 3 please, let me know, it would be much appreciated. Any recent (and decent) Rebol (or Rebol 3) may suffice, as long as it is 64-bit.

[1] I believe it to be a major reason for Rebol not being used much. We need a proper, working Rebol! One working, actively maintained implementation, not hundreds of half-assed ones. :( I really hope Red makes it.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#58

Post by johnisgood »

timbit42 wrote: post #52
johnisgood wrote: post #15

Tcl and Rebol are great. The code is compact, very easy to understand and quick to write, especially Rebol. You can do GUI in both Tcl/Tk and Rebol as well. You might want to check Rebol out as well: http://www.rebol.com/docs/expert-intro.html (or http://www.rebol.com/docs/design-objectives.html ).

Rebol was created by Carl Sassenrath who wrote the Amiga OS and put pre-emptive multi-tasking in it. After he left Commodore he wrote Amiga Logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

Yup. I have no experience AT ALL with Amiga OS. I really love Rebol though. Perhaps I would love Amiga OS as well. I should read up on it. Any interesting writings on its philosophy and whatnot? Similar to what could be found about Plan 9, for example.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#59

Post by wrenky »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #21

Interesting to read how Expect came so soon out of TCL (TCL: 1988, Expect: 1990) Expect remains an essential tool for dealing with interactive (but not TUI) terminal application, and in usage really fits its TCL roots perfectly. In contrast, I've found the Perl and Python ports of Expect to be somewhat awkward, not fitting those languages paradigms as well. In the 2020s, I still think Expect is TCL's killer app.

Aw man I love Expect. We have a bunch of legacy stuff and Tcl/Expect powers most of it. Every few years people try to replace it with python and pexpect, there was a nodejs implementation, and perl. They sorta worked, but anytime you had to something more complicated than a single session or simple parsing they fell apart.

now I have it wrapped in a starpack and just dont tell them the language unless they ask lol

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#60

Post by kazinator »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #21

Interesting to read how Expect came so soon out of TCL (TCL: 1988, Expect: 1990) Expect remains an essential tool for dealing with interactive (but not TUI) terminal application, and in usage really fits its TCL roots perfectly. In contrast, I've found the Perl and Python ports of Expect to be somewhat awkward, not fitting those languages paradigms as well. In the 2020s, I still think Expect is TCL's killer app.

I use expect out of cgit's syntax-highlighting.sh script, to ... invoke Vim on the input do proper syntax highlighting and save it with :TOhtml.

Good thing cgit caches, eh?

Post reply on HN