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Hecl is cool. It's what Jacl should have been. Keep up the good work.
by bayareaguy 19y ago
Hecl is cool. It's what Jacl should have been. Keep up the good work.
- davidw 19y agoThanks! They have different goals though... Jacl is an implementation of Tcl, whereas Hecl is its own language, that borrows some things from Tcl, but tries to improve on it: the core is smaller, we've abandoned the "everything is a string" idea (note, however, that Tcl does not represent everything internally as a string and hasn't for 10 years), and the commands are different. Hecl is also very targeted at applications where its small size and flexibility give it a bit of an advantage... There's no way I can compete with JRuby or things like that on standard Java, given their popularity, so I continue to target the mobile/embedded space, even though you certainly could use it as an embedded interpreter in all kinds of different Java apps.
- bayareaguy 19y agoHow do you think Hecl compares to Sun's own JavaFX Script / JavaFX Mobile?
- davidw 19y agoTheir language looks interesting, but it's fairly new. They certainly have a lot more resources to throw at it than I do, but on the other hand: - Hecl is real, and runs on all kinds of existing mobile phones, even old ones, and is deployed in existing products. - Hecl is not tied to Sun, so for instance the Android port has no political implications. I'm doing it because Android looks like a decent bet. The fact that they made a scripting language at all is proof that my basic idea (scripting language for mobile phones) is on the right track. Incidentally, YC also funded a company that made something similar: http://tsumobi.com/ http://tsumobi.com/