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Certainly a trend to move away from it. For example, Amira is a package that has been around about 30 years and uses it to script rendering. On the other hand

Certainly a trend to move away from it. For example, Amira is a package that has been around about 30 years and uses it to script rendering. On the other hand a competitor (Carl Zeiss), a decade ago did a rewrite of their software and choose python (among others) as a scripting language. Nikon also developed their own language that resembles basic/C#. Asking your users to script in TCL rather than something like python is sadistic, and a position advocated by aging neckbeards. https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/electron-microscopy/products/software-em-3d-vis/amira-software.html https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/electron-microscopy/...

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Asking your users to script in TCL rather than something like python is sadistic, and a position advocated by aging neckbeards. Right. It's almost impossible to reason about a language that has no meaningful grammar. Finding bugs is hard, automatically finding problems nearly impossible. Tcl did give us one important thing -- Tk -- via `wish`, which was an important step in informing how people might want to add GUIs to scripts. But actually still committing to teach it in this day and age is really perpetuating bad habits when there are better options out there -- even PowerShell is a better choice.
auxym 5y ago
Eh, I don't know. I wouldn't choose Tcl today for such a use case, maybe Lua. But you could certainly do worse than Tcl. Like a half-thought out custom language. Anyone ever coded nastran DMAP? Or Tex macros? I'd be ecstatic to have TCL over that. I've seen a materials testing machine whose method to script custom test sequences was a "programming language" that was displayed as text but you couldn't actually type things in. You'd have to select constructs such as a for loop or conditional from a drop down box, then a dialog would appear asking you for the parameters of the loop (start, end, etc). Actually, I think I even prefer Tcl to Excel's VBA.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> Asking your users to script in TCL rather than something like python is sadistic, and a position advocated by aging neckbeards. Right. It's almost impossible to reason about a language that has no meaningful grammar. Finding bugs is hard, automatically finding problems nearly impossible. Tcl did give us one important thing -- Tk -- via `wish`, which was an important step in informing how people might want to add GUIs to scripts. But actually still committing to teach it in this day and age is really perpetuating bad habits when there are better options out there -- even PowerShell is a better choice.

auxym 5y ago

Eh, I don't know. I wouldn't choose Tcl today for such a use case, maybe Lua. But you could certainly do worse than Tcl. Like a half-thought out custom language. Anyone ever coded nastran DMAP? Or Tex macros? I'd be ecstatic to have TCL over that. I've seen a materials testing machine whose method to script custom test sequences was a "programming language" that was displayed as text but you couldn't actually type things in. You'd have to select constructs such as a for loop or conditional from a drop down box, then a dialog would appear asking you for the parameters of the loop (start, end, etc). Actually, I think I even prefer Tcl to Excel's VBA.