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My first job was in Tcl. I grew to really like the language, though when I had to leave the company I was at a pretty strong disadvantage due to how uncommon it
by geogra4 7y ago
My first job was in Tcl. I grew to really like the language, though when I had to leave the company I was at a pretty strong disadvantage due to how uncommon it is.
Everything is a string is a great way to reduce the mental load about typing.
- commandlinefan 7y agoOne of my earlier jobs was porting Travelocity.com from TCL to Java - the TCL programmers loved the old site and absolutely hated the "new" one. I don't think I've ever managed to make more enemies in my professional life than I did in those couple of years.
- ramses0 7y agoCARL!
- stjohnswarts 7y agoI remember you >_< , whipper snapper!
- geogra4 7y agoTcl to Java is a huge change. Totally different syntax / syntactic style. I can imagine the annoyance of the Tcl programmers having to deal with the inherant verbose-ness of java.
- commandlinefan 7y agoYeah, and this was in the relatively early days of Java, too, so the front-end was all JSP. Oh, did I mention they originally gave us a three-month deadline to port the ENTIRE site?
- ghettoimp 7y ago> Everything is a string is a great way to reduce the mental load about typing. I feel almost the exact opposite way... Everything is a string means I have to "know" whether any given function takes {a single element, a list of elements, a glob, a list of globs, ???}. When I inevitably mess it up, I don't get any help at all from the language. In the best case, I'll hit a run-time error and figure it out. In the worst case, my program will just do some random thing that isn't what I wanted, and I'll get to debug it.
- roastsquirrel 7y agoThe Tcl/Tk documentation is very good, so I read the documentation for those details, eg for lrange, lrange list first last List must be a valid Tcl list. This command will return a new list consisting of elements first through last, inclusive ... (not put it all here because it goes on a bit :)
- ghettoimp 7y agoSure. Sadly my company's code base, and the vendor's tool that it extends, are not so well documented. A statically typed language gives just you so much more sanity checking -- sometimes even without having to compile anything, what with these fancy IDEs.