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Not to be mean about it or anything, but I really dislike TCL. Granted, you could do much worse. Unlike shell scripts you at least have access to sensible dat

Not to be mean about it or anything, but I really dislike TCL. Granted, you could do much worse. Unlike shell scripts you at least have access to sensible data structures like lists, dictionaries, and so on. And unlike shell scripts or Makefiles, you can actually handle spaces in your data, so that's at least not horrible. But when everything is a string, there is no type safety anywhere. So many things that should just be compile errors blow up on you at run-time instead. God help you if you're using code that other people are updating and silently changing. The syntax is also pretty annoying at times. For instance, you can use unbalanced {} characters within comments, but not if those comments are within a proc. You can nicely write long lists over many lines with {...}, but you can't put comments in those. Anyway, haters gonna hate. I hope other folks like it more than I do.

sedatk 7y ago
Lack of strong-typing isn't something specific to TCL or rare at all. Python and JavaScript are weakly typed too.
- gugagore 7y ago
  but not everything is a string in Python and JavaScript. It's possible your parent didn't mean literally "strong typing" or even "static typing", but instead more generally "notions of types, whether at runtime or before".
  - ghettoimp 7y ago
    Yes exactly. TCL is somehow even more weakly typed than conventional dynamically typed languages. For instance, in Python, len(3) is an error, but in TCL, llength 3 is 1.
siver_john 7y ago
I'm in a similar boat of TCL dislike. But that probably has a lot to do with my first introduction was through installing a program and having all types of difficulties doing so. Being exposed to a language at first by trying to understand what it is doing in installing software is probably not a great introduction. I did get the software installed but my dislike remained This was probably further increased by the fact that post that I had bad experiences with my supervisor that just soured everything about it. Even to this day where it would benefit me to use TCL, I try to avoid it in favor of languages like Python.

sedatk 7y ago

Lack of strong-typing isn't something specific to TCL or rare at all. Python and JavaScript are weakly typed too.

gugagore 7y ago
but not everything is a string in Python and JavaScript. It's possible your parent didn't mean literally "strong typing" or even "static typing", but instead more generally "notions of types, whether at runtime or before".
- ghettoimp 7y ago
  Yes exactly. TCL is somehow even more weakly typed than conventional dynamically typed languages. For instance, in Python, len(3) is an error, but in TCL, llength 3 is 1.

siver_john 7y ago

I'm in a similar boat of TCL dislike. But that probably has a lot to do with my first introduction was through installing a program and having all types of difficulties doing so. Being exposed to a language at first by trying to understand what it is doing in installing software is probably not a great introduction. I did get the software installed but my dislike remained This was probably further increased by the fact that post that I had bad experiences with my supervisor that just soured everything about it. Even to this day where it would benefit me to use TCL, I try to avoid it in favor of languages like Python.