The Birth of Tcl

Lexical scope also allows the lambda calculus to work, and with it powerful constructs like parameterized functions over values, and fine-grained restriction of variable access through lexical closures. An eager young Scheme programmer can write a module or object system for Scheme in an afternoon.

Tcl allows those things to be written, but they're a bit more involved. And you have to exercise caution, as which bindings are live when a particular Tcl script gets executed is not clear from the program text. (I believe Tcl with upvar actually has dynamic scope semantics which, yet again, can of hell.) But hey, it's a wonderful thing that Tcl admits as much metaprogramming as it does, that puts it well ahead of many popular languages.

Sun's reaction was to adopt "only Sparc, only Solaris, only Java forever and ever" as their roadmap, publicly killing SpringOS, Tcl, Self (programming language) and so on. That did make the clients happy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218

https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060181

pwg on May 13, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Extending Tcl

Why you should not use Tcl

https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730

DonHopkins on May 14, 2018 [–]

And with that diplomatically worded message, RMS kicked of The Infamous TCL War.

That was Stallman's response to Sun bombastically pushing TCL as the official scripting language of the web, BEFORE Live Oak / Java was a widely known (or evangelized) thing.

At the point anybody started talking about a Java/TCL bridge, it was already all over for TCL becoming the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet".

Sun's unilateral anointment of TCL as the official Internet scripting language trigged RMS's "Why you should not use Tcl" message, which triggered the TCL War, which triggered Sun to switch to Java.

After the TCL war finally subsided, Sun quietly pushed TCL aside and loudly evangelize Java instead. The TCL community was quite flustered and disappointed after first winning the title "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet" and then having the title yanked away and given to Java.

Any talk of bridges were just table scraps for TCL, the redheaded bastard stepchild sitting outside on the back porch in the rain, smoking a cigarette and commiserating with NeWS and Self.

Tom Lord's description of what happened is insightful and accurate:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft...

>The Infamous Tcl War

>[...] Mr. Ousterhout had, a few years prior, developed Tcl while on the faculty of UC Berkeley - mainly, I think, to have a handy tool for other research and only secondarily as an experiment in language design. And he topped it off with Tk. Tcl/Tk took off in a huge way. It was easy to understand. The source code, written in Mr. Ousterhout's methodical and lucid style, was a joy to read. At the time, about the most convenient option for developing a GUI to run on a unix system was to write C code against the Motif toolkit - an ugly, expensive, and frequently disappointing process. With Tcl/Tk in hand, people started handing out new "mini-GUIs" for this and that, like candy. Tcl/Tk started to find application in some rather intense areas, like, for example, the "control station" software for some oil rigs. It was a smash hit.

>Meanwhile, I don't think I'm letting too many cats out of the bag here, the informal Silicon Valley social network of well placed hackers were quietly and unofficially circulating some very interesting confidential whitepapers from Sun Microsystems. One of their researchers, a fellow called Mr. Gosling, had dusted off a language he'd once led the design of called "Oak". Oak was originally intended for use in embedded systems. Its basic premise was that devices ought to be Turing complete and hackable, whenever possible. Oak's approach to statically verifiable byte-code comes from that origin. Mr. Gosling came out of Carnegie Mellon University and the attiude behind Oak was popular there. As one grad student had quipped a few years earlier: "If a light switch isn't Turing Complete I don't even want to touch it."

>In light of the rising star of web browsers, the folks at Sun conceived the notion of offering up a derivative of Oak to serve as the extension language for browsers. (It is probably worth mentioning here that Mr. Gosling was earlier well known for making one of the very first unix versions of Emacs.) Oak was re-named "Java" and the rest of its history is fairly well known.

>I've read, since then, that up to around that point Brendan Eich had been working on a Scheme-based extension language for Netscape Navigator. Such was the power of the hegemony of the high level folks at Sun that the word came down on Mr. Eich: "Get it done. And make it look like Java." Staying true to his sense of Self, he quickly knocked out the first implementation of Mocha, later renamed Javascript. This phenomenon of Sun's hegemony influencing other firms turns out to be a small pattern, as you'll see.

>Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision:

>Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars.

>Mr. Eich, bless his soul, brute-forced passed them, abandoning Scheme and inventing Javascript. [...]