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The Birth of Tcl

tcl.tk

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Re: The Birth of Tcl

#101

Post by antod »

sedatk wrote: post #95
RHSeeger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I adore Tcl, and always have. Funny that you mention Lisp, because I've always considered Tcl a kind of "close cousin" of Lisp; both in it's code structure and the ability to build new control structures and the like. It feels more Lisp-y to me than it does C-y.

You're absolutely right. But I have bad memories of dealing with parentheses in AutoLISP from the 90's. The trauma remains :)

My only lisp experience was trying to teach myself AutoLISP in notepad in the mid 90s - I remember the parentheses trauma well. This was before I knew any CS or what a functional language was.

I did come away impressed though with how it could map to CAD concepts. It reminded me of the RPN stack when programming my HP42 calculator. I could sense there was an underlying elegance I wasn't fully grasping.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#102

Post by cafard »

chakkepolja wrote: post #100
cafard wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a Native American symbol also. It was on the insignia of the 45th Division, a National Guard unit from the American southwest; but as WW II approached, it was swapped for a thunderbird. Kipling used a Hindu swastika on his books. He also, I believe, discontinued this with the rise of the Nazis. Don't those arms point counter-clockwise, though?

Buddhist swastika is counterclockwise. Hindu Swastika is clockwise. None of them are tilted like Nazi swastika, though.

Ah. Then it was the Buddhist swastika Kipling used.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#103

Post by monbis »

user3939382 wrote: post #64

I wonder in what context the language comes up for others. I remember having to use it to accomplish something maybe once over the last 25 years(?) and it was so long ago I don’t even remember what it was.

We're using it now (2022) to run some high volume transaction websites. We are not writing new apps in it, but a lot of existing code still uses it, and is actively modified.

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#104

Post by blacksqr »

pjmlp wrote: post #13
sedatk wrote: post #2

I like Tcl a lot. The design is simple, extremely easy to learn, and yet the code is still maintainable (((looking at you LISP))). Among the scripting languages I've used, I probably liked Tcl the most. I wish it didn't fall out of favor.

I was a big Tcl user between 1999 and 2002, our startup was an heavy user, however the experience of slowly replacing Tcl with C code, made me never choose languages without either JIT or AOT compiler ever again, other than for scripting tasks.

There was a commercially available Tcl compiler available at that time. Did you ever take a look at it?

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GE+ICE+Tcl+compiler

Re: The Birth of Tcl

#105

Post by occoder »

pjmlp wrote: post #13
sedatk wrote: post #2

I like Tcl a lot. The design is simple, extremely easy to learn, and yet the code is still maintainable (((looking at you LISP))). Among the scripting languages I've used, I probably liked Tcl the most. I wish it didn't fall out of favor.

I was a big Tcl user between 1999 and 2002, our startup was an heavy user, however the experience of slowly replacing Tcl with C code, made me never choose languages without either JIT or AOT compiler ever again, other than for scripting tasks.

That was a long time ago, and computers have come a long way.

Maybe now is a good time to re-examine those assumptions and re-evaluate those priorities.

At a time when Electron is the cross platform UI toolkit of choice, Tcl/Tk seriously deserves a second look.

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