5 ms·

Guile was RMS' counter-argument to tcl as an extension language back in the days, right? And wasn't it supposed to be a possible elisp replacement, too? It wou

by mhd 16y ago

Guile was RMS' counter-argument to tcl as an extension language back in the days, right? And wasn't it supposed to be a possible elisp replacement, too? It would be very nice if someone could summarize the current state of the language, i.e. why one would use it instead of Racket or Gambit.

davidw 16y ago
Yeah, Tcl had/has an "evil" BSD license.
- froydnj 16y ago
  Surprisingly enough, this was not among the reasons cited in RMS's original "Why you should not use Tcl" post: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmarin 16y ago
    The only reasons were [1]: -Tcl is not Lisp. -At that time Tcl was being developed by an Evil company: Sun Microsystems. At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp. It looks a tiny bit like Lisp, but semantically it isn't, and it's not as clean. Then someone showed me an ad where Sun was trying to hire somebody to work on TCL to make it the “de-facto standard extension language” of the world. And I thought, “We've got to stop that from happening.” So we started to make Scheme the standard extensibility language for GNU. Not Common Lisp, because it was too large. The idea was that we would have a Scheme interpreter designed to be linked into applications in the same way TCL was linked into applications. We would then recommend that as the preferred extensibility package for all GNU programs. [1]http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
    - sigzero 16y ago
      Which is sad really. Tcl is a nice language and the community is great.
      - cscheid 16y ago
        Have you seen multiple kLOC tcl apps? I have, and it is not pretty :) Thing about extension languages is that they tend to be nice languages to write code, so people write a lot of code in them, and suddenly your app is 95% written in the extension language. Scheme is the language I know that grows best from a simple extension language to a full-fledged mature programming language.
        pmarin 16y ago
        Tcl has been improved a lot since the Tcl War (17 years ago!) including namespaces, module/package system, a native OO, a sane thread support, and Dicts. I am not sure if it is still true that Tcl doesn't scale well. By the way I wrote a toy, buggy and ugly scheme implementation in pure Tcl a year ago: http://wiki.tcl.tk/25512 http://wiki.tcl.tk/25512
        sigzero 16y ago
        Yes, unfortunately, nobody really uses either one in the grand scheme of languages.
        mhd 16y ago
        If it's a large tcl "app", then quite often that's the first mistake. I've seen large Tcl systems which work pretty well. A combination of different applications, cron jobs, scripts etc., with some C/C++ libraries for integration and performance-critical things. With the added benefit of having a pretty decent graphical toolkit on top. Won't be the winner of a GUI beauty pageant, but it works. And most of those systems were pretty old, so it's not like you had a lot of better options back in the days. Tcl was pretty awesome in the mid-90s. Most Java programs that replaced those enterprise tcl systems were a lot worse than their predecessors. For a new project? Maybe, maybe not.
    - 16y ago
  - davidw 16y ago
    Ousterhout's reply is worth reading: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html I can't find where I'd seen it, but RMS certainly wasn't really keen on the idea of a BSD-licensed system becoming popular, either.
    - plinkplonk 16y ago
      "Ousterhout's reply is worth reading: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html An excerpt, which (imo) should be quoted more often "Language designers love to argue about why this language or that language must be better or worse a priori, but none of these arguments really matter a lot. Ultimately all language issues get settled when users vote with their feet. If Tcl makes people more productive then they will use it; when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is here already), then people will switch to that language. This is The Law, and it is good. The Law says to me that Scheme (or any other Lisp dialect) is probably not the "right" language: too many people have voted with their feet over the last 30 years. I encourage all Tcl dis-believers to produce the "right" language(s), make them publically available, and let them be judged according to The Law."
      - davidw 16y ago
        > when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is here already), then people will switch to that language. That part is actually not entirely true. Languages have positive network externalities, as well as some very serious lock-in (see: Cobol) and switching costs.
wingo 16y ago
As far as history goes, http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/History.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/History.h... is where it's at.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
thomas11 16y ago
The ELisp frontend of Guile 2.0 will allow a gradual migration from ELisp to Scheme by integrating Guile into Emacs and letting it execute code in both languages. I can't wait for that to happen. Guile hacker Andy Wingo (wingo on HN, hi!) gave a talk about this and other recent Guile developments, which I summarized (and linked) here: http://jugglingbits.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/andy-wingo-recent-developments-in-guile/ http://jugglingbits.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/andy-wingo-rece...

by mhd 16y ago

davidw 16y ago

Yeah, Tcl had/has an "evil" BSD license.

froydnj 16y ago
Surprisingly enough, this was not among the reasons cited in RMS's original "Why you should not use Tcl" post: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- pmarin 16y ago
  The only reasons were [1]: -Tcl is not Lisp. -At that time Tcl was being developed by an Evil company: Sun Microsystems. At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp. It looks a tiny bit like Lisp, but semantically it isn't, and it's not as clean. Then someone showed me an ad where Sun was trying to hire somebody to work on TCL to make it the “de-facto standard extension language” of the world. And I thought, “We've got to stop that from happening.” So we started to make Scheme the standard extensibility language for GNU. Not Common Lisp, because it was too large. The idea was that we would have a Scheme interpreter designed to be linked into applications in the same way TCL was linked into applications. We would then recommend that as the preferred extensibility package for all GNU programs. [1]http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
  - sigzero 16y ago
    Which is sad really. Tcl is a nice language and the community is great.
    - cscheid 16y ago
      Have you seen multiple kLOC tcl apps? I have, and it is not pretty :) Thing about extension languages is that they tend to be nice languages to write code, so people write a lot of code in them, and suddenly your app is 95% written in the extension language. Scheme is the language I know that grows best from a simple extension language to a full-fledged mature programming language.
      - pmarin 16y ago
        Tcl has been improved a lot since the Tcl War (17 years ago!) including namespaces, module/package system, a native OO, a sane thread support, and Dicts. I am not sure if it is still true that Tcl doesn't scale well. By the way I wrote a toy, buggy and ugly scheme implementation in pure Tcl a year ago: http://wiki.tcl.tk/25512 http://wiki.tcl.tk/25512
      - sigzero 16y ago
        Yes, unfortunately, nobody really uses either one in the grand scheme of languages.
      - mhd 16y ago
        If it's a large tcl "app", then quite often that's the first mistake. I've seen large Tcl systems which work pretty well. A combination of different applications, cron jobs, scripts etc., with some C/C++ libraries for integration and performance-critical things. With the added benefit of having a pretty decent graphical toolkit on top. Won't be the winner of a GUI beauty pageant, but it works. And most of those systems were pretty old, so it's not like you had a lot of better options back in the days. Tcl was pretty awesome in the mid-90s. Most Java programs that replaced those enterprise tcl systems were a lot worse than their predecessors. For a new project? Maybe, maybe not.
  - 16y ago
- davidw 16y ago
  Ousterhout's reply is worth reading: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html I can't find where I'd seen it, but RMS certainly wasn't really keen on the idea of a BSD-licensed system becoming popular, either.
  - plinkplonk 16y ago
    "Ousterhout's reply is worth reading: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html An excerpt, which (imo) should be quoted more often "Language designers love to argue about why this language or that language must be better or worse a priori, but none of these arguments really matter a lot. Ultimately all language issues get settled when users vote with their feet. If Tcl makes people more productive then they will use it; when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is here already), then people will switch to that language. This is The Law, and it is good. The Law says to me that Scheme (or any other Lisp dialect) is probably not the "right" language: too many people have voted with their feet over the last 30 years. I encourage all Tcl dis-believers to produce the "right" language(s), make them publically available, and let them be judged according to The Law."
    - davidw 16y ago
      > when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is here already), then people will switch to that language. That part is actually not entirely true. Languages have positive network externalities, as well as some very serious lock-in (see: Cobol) and switching costs.

wingo 16y ago

As far as history goes, http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/History.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/History.h... is where it's at.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

thomas11 16y ago

The ELisp frontend of Guile 2.0 will allow a gradual migration from ELisp to Scheme by integrating Guile into Emacs and letting it execute code in both languages. I can't wait for that to happen. Guile hacker Andy Wingo (wingo on HN, hi!) gave a talk about this and other recent Guile developments, which I summarized (and linked) here: http://jugglingbits.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/andy-wingo-recent-developments-in-guile/ http://jugglingbits.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/andy-wingo-rece...