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I'd say it's not about the capabilities of the language, but the scope of the environment. You need a language to orchestrate your builds and tests (which usual
by tremon 6y ago
I'd say it's not about the capabilities of the language, but the scope of the environment. You need a language to orchestrate your builds and tests (which usually means command execution, variable interpolation, conditional statements and looping constructs), and you need a language to interact with your build system (fetching code, storing and fetching build artifacts, metadata administration).
Lua would be a good candidate for the latter, but its standard library is minimal on purpose, and that means a lot of the functionality would have to be provided by the build system. Interaction with the shell from Python is needlessly cumbersome (especially capturing stdout/stderr), so of those options my preference would be Ruby. Heck, even standard shell with a system-specific binary to call back to the build system would work.
- oblio 6y agoPeople hate on it, but do you know what language would be perfect these days? Easy shelling - check. Easily embeddable - check Easily sandboxable - check. Reasonably rich standard library - check. High level abstractions - check. If you're still guessing what language it is, it's Tcl. Good old Tcl. It's just that is syntax is moderately weird and the documentation available for it is so ancient and creaky that you can sometimes see mummies through the cracks. Tcl would pretty much solve all these pipeline issues, but it's not a cool language. I really wish someone with a ton of money and backing would create "TypeTcl" on top of Tcl (à la Typescript and Javascript) and market it to hell and back, create brand new documentation for it, etc.
- mumblemumble 6y agoHow is the Windows support? One of my big needs for any general-purpose build system is that I can get a single build that works on both Windows and POSIX. Without using WSL. That said, you're right, at least at first blush, tcl is an attractive, if easy to forget, option.
- oblio 6y agoWindows support? Great as far as I can tell. ActiveTcl, the Windows distribution, has been a thing for several decades now. I remember using it back in 2008.
- ptx 6y agoThe IDE/editor that ships with Python for Windows is built on Tkinter, which is a wrapper for Tcl/Tk. So it seems to work fine.
- imtringued 6y agoI'd rather see an Lua successor reach widespread adoption. Wren pretty much solved all my gripes with Lua but there is no actively maintained Java implementation.
- blacksqr 6y ago> I really wish someone with a ton of money and backing would create "TypeTcl" They did. Larry McVoy of BitMover created Little, a typed extension of Tcl [0]. Didn't do the marketing bit, though. [0] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Little https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Little