3 ms·

It's a shame too that TCL wasn't chosen to be the script of choice.

DonHopkins 6y ago
There was a whole war about that, in which Sun originally supported TCL (having hired John Ousterhout), that was started by RMS firing the first shot ("Why you should not use TCL"), but which TCL eventually lost. The Tcl War (1994) (vanderburg.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html John Ousterhout's classy reply: https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html Personally, I was on the side of ScriptX at the time (essentially object oriented scheme with a more traditional syntax and a nice multimedia class library including QuickTime), but it wasn't mature or open enough at the time, and we lost too: ScriptX and the World Wide Web. "Link Globally, Interact Locally". By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX The real tragedy is that the script of choice for the web was't Lua: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 by DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 [–] Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API." http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Awesome read. Thank you.

There was a whole war about that, in which Sun originally supported TCL (having hired John Ousterhout), that was started by RMS firing the first shot ("Why you should not use TCL"), but which TCL eventually lost. The Tcl War (1994) (vanderburg.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html John Ousterhout's classy reply: https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html Personally, I was on the side of ScriptX at the time (essentially object oriented scheme with a more traditional syntax and a nice multimedia class library including QuickTime), but it wasn't mature or open enough at the time, and we lost too: ScriptX and the World Wide Web. "Link Globally, Interact Locally". By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX The real tragedy is that the script of choice for the web was't Lua: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 by DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 [–] Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API." http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

doublerabbit 6y ago
Awesome read. Thank you.