4 ms·

I used to work for a company which heavily used TCL[0]. When I started working there, I really questioned his decisions about the stack and the language in gen

I used to work for a company which heavily used TCL[0]. When I started working there, I really questioned his decisions about the stack and the language in general ( everything is a string ) After a few weeks I realized that, this stack was blazing fast in combination with the NAVI[1] server which is written for high performance web sites. This guy wrote everything you could possibly think of in TCL. That company is powering a ton of enterprise grade e-commerce web sites. I still see it as a secret weapon and I'd probably use it as well if there wasn't my fetish for statically typed languages. edit: As a side note, I'd like to mention that this guy taught me that I shouldn't go with the hype but just choose a language/framework that helps me finishing my projects. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviServer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviServer

147 10y ago
I'm interested in hearing more. Are you allowed to tell us more about the company? Number of employees? It sounded like you got hired to do TCL without knowing TCL. Why was it a secret weapon? Was it productivity?
- Aij7eFae 10y ago
  > Are you allowed to tell us more about the company? Number of employees? We were around 15 people ( sales, design not included ) > It sounded like you got hired to do TCL without knowing TCL. Indeed, in their job description, they just wrote that I had to be curious and willing to learn something unusual. They didn't mention TCL. > Why was it a secret weapon? I would say flexibilty, it was quite impressive to watch how his very own web framework evolved. He would check out new frameworks over night, if he liked some patterns/features etc. from other frameworks, he would just put it into his own framework over night. The most impressive part, was probably the loose coupling of all the software components. There wasn't some kind of an ORM, just pure handcrafted optimized SQL. The secret weapon was, how he ignored other opinions. Just a few examples, for some people OOP is the way to go, anything else is just unacceptable. They are forcing themself into a corner with limited options. I agree, OOP is awesome but it's not the solution for all our problems, in TCL we just could switch from OOP to imperative or to functional without breaking anything. As already described above, plain SQL is already the best DSL for databases, we didn't have any abstraction layer on top of that, which we had to learn. I don't agree with all his opinions but I do agree on the fact, that we software engineers tend to over engineer things.
gt565k 10y ago
Oh wow! As soon as I read TCL, I started having flashbacks of trying to write TCL scripts for my eggdrop IRC bot in the early 2000s. It's amazing to hear that a company actually runs on it!
- BorisMelnik 10y ago
  that's what I thought of also..."tickle tk"
konradb 10y ago
This reminds me of the ArsDigita Community System by Philip Greenspun and his company, all written in TCL, until I think there was some Java rewrite at about the time everything went wrong.
loumf 10y ago
TCL was pretty common for webdev in the mid-nineties. There was some AOL thing people liked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver edit: ah -- I see it's the same thing as the NAVI you mentioned. Nevermind.
vram22 10y ago
>This guy wrote everything you could possibly think of in TCL. >That company is powering a ton of enterprise grade e-commerce web sites. During the dot-com boom (late 1990s through early 2000s) there was this company called Vignette which was using Tcl on the server for e-commerce, IIRC. They had a product in Tcl, which could be customized for various e-commerce apps, I think. Probably the USP was RAD, Tcl being a scripting language. Also I read about AOL using AOLServer which was written in Tcl.

147 10y ago

I'm interested in hearing more. Are you allowed to tell us more about the company? Number of employees? It sounded like you got hired to do TCL without knowing TCL. Why was it a secret weapon? Was it productivity?

Aij7eFae 10y ago
> Are you allowed to tell us more about the company? Number of employees? We were around 15 people ( sales, design not included ) > It sounded like you got hired to do TCL without knowing TCL. Indeed, in their job description, they just wrote that I had to be curious and willing to learn something unusual. They didn't mention TCL. > Why was it a secret weapon? I would say flexibilty, it was quite impressive to watch how his very own web framework evolved. He would check out new frameworks over night, if he liked some patterns/features etc. from other frameworks, he would just put it into his own framework over night. The most impressive part, was probably the loose coupling of all the software components. There wasn't some kind of an ORM, just pure handcrafted optimized SQL. The secret weapon was, how he ignored other opinions. Just a few examples, for some people OOP is the way to go, anything else is just unacceptable. They are forcing themself into a corner with limited options. I agree, OOP is awesome but it's not the solution for all our problems, in TCL we just could switch from OOP to imperative or to functional without breaking anything. As already described above, plain SQL is already the best DSL for databases, we didn't have any abstraction layer on top of that, which we had to learn. I don't agree with all his opinions but I do agree on the fact, that we software engineers tend to over engineer things.

gt565k 10y ago

Oh wow! As soon as I read TCL, I started having flashbacks of trying to write TCL scripts for my eggdrop IRC bot in the early 2000s. It's amazing to hear that a company actually runs on it!

BorisMelnik 10y ago
that's what I thought of also..."tickle tk"

konradb 10y ago

This reminds me of the ArsDigita Community System by Philip Greenspun and his company, all written in TCL, until I think there was some Java rewrite at about the time everything went wrong.

loumf 10y ago

TCL was pretty common for webdev in the mid-nineties. There was some AOL thing people liked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver edit: ah -- I see it's the same thing as the NAVI you mentioned. Nevermind.

vram22 10y ago

>This guy wrote everything you could possibly think of in TCL. >That company is powering a ton of enterprise grade e-commerce web sites. During the dot-com boom (late 1990s through early 2000s) there was this company called Vignette which was using Tcl on the server for e-commerce, IIRC. They had a product in Tcl, which could be customized for various e-commerce apps, I think. Probably the USP was RAD, Tcl being a scripting language. Also I read about AOL using AOLServer which was written in Tcl.