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The article doesn't discuss how Sun turned away from Tcl and embraced Java instead (understandable since it focuses on Tcl). It's interesting because Sun had t

The article doesn't discuss how Sun turned away from Tcl and embraced Java instead (understandable since it focuses on Tcl). It's interesting because Sun had the same goals for Tcl as they did for Java (or vice-versa!): "evolve Tcl into a universal scripting language for the Internet", "allows untrusted scripts to be evaluated safely", "Tcl plugin, so that Tcl scripts can be evaluated in a Web browser". Ousterhout spun Tcl out of Sun in late 1997, which feels like the timeline when Sun was turning to Java. Is there insider history available anywhere on how and why that transition happened? I can certainly imagine that performance and expressivity were a concern.

jgrahamc 5y ago
I was the VP of Engineering of Ousterhout's spinout company, Scriptics, and worked for him. I don't know the story of how Sun made the decision but John has a longer History of Tcl here: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php "At the same time, it became clear that Sun needed to focus its language evangelism around Java, which was released shortly after I arrived at Sun and had become hugely popular. Though Java and Tcl are very different languages, used for very different purposes, it would have been too hard for Sun to evangelize both of them simultaneously. I came to the conclusion that, overall, Java offered more benefits for Sun than Tcl did." John was a great person to work for. He hired me despite the fact that in the interview with him I told him I'd never used Tcl and when he extolled its virtues he told me that it was "easy to learn and had powerful regular expressions" and I said "Don't those two things contradict each other?" He stopped talking and had a rather surprised expression on his face. I thought I'd blown it. Actually, I'd done the most important thing I could possibly have done: made him think something new.
- rcurry 5y ago
  I got exposed to TCL/TK while working for a National Lab a long time ago. At the time I was a hardcore C++ developer and after a week or two with TCL/Tk I was almost dying laughing about how easy it was to build really cool applications. I truly miss working with that platform.
  - bch 5y ago
    Argonne National leaned heavily on Tcl relatively recently for a petascale super-computer project of theirs[0] (I was introduced to it by Justin Wozniak of Argonne at a Tcl conference in Manassas). [0] https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~wozniak/papers/Swift_Tcl_2015.pdf https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~wozniak/papers/Swift_Tcl_2015.pdf
- EdwardCoffin 5y ago
  In his google talk on the philosophy of software design, he said that the hires who worked out best for him were the ones where he just really enjoyed the conversations with them during the interviews [1] [1] https://youtu.be/bmSAYlu0NcY?t=3632 https://youtu.be/bmSAYlu0NcY?t=3632
- dkarl 5y ago
  There's definitely a reality split between developers who accept early in their careers that they need to learn SQL and regular expressions and developers who cling to the hope that if they hold on just a few more years they won't be important skills any more.
amitamit 5y ago
I was at Sun Labs at that time - Ousterhout's group was internally regarded as one of the top groups there. I was in a different group. My recollection is that the concerns were not around technical merit: a. Tcl and Java were positioned as competitors, b. Sun saw Java as a critical weapon in its fight against Microsoft, c. Java won the internal battle, which led to Tcl/Scriptics spin out.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  In the 90's Java did have technical merit because the Tcl of that era didn't have a bytecode interpreter. It wouldn't have been practical for the sort of low level embedded devices Sun was aiming to support with Java processors. The resources needed for dynamism is also a handicap for such platforms.
jecel 5y ago
I only watched this from the outside, but my impression was that it was an overreaction. Sun had a nice research operating system based on Java called SpringOS, but when clients heard about that they revolted. The transition from SunOS to Solaris had been traumatic and they threatened to jump ship if there would be any more changes ahead. Sun's reaction was to adopt "only Sparc, only Solaris, only Java forever and ever" as their roadmap, publicly killing SpringOS, Tcl, Self (programming language) and so on. That did make the clients happy.
- shaunxcode 5y ago
  to be fair to sun and Self at least a lot of the research was rolled into the hotspot stuff!
  - jecel 5y ago
    They didn't do it in a smart way. Part of the Self group joined forces with some other researchers to create a company called Animorphic which would build the world's "fastest Smalltalk" using the Self technology. It was called StrongTalk and had other interesting features like optional type declaration and extensive use of traits and mixins. Given the buzz around Java they did a quick demo showing that language running on top of their technology, and in 1997 Sun bought them to use that HotSpot technology in their main Java implementation. So they paid a lot for what they previously already had but ignored.
DonHopkins 5y ago
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/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060181 pwg on May 13, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Extending Tcl Why you should not use Tcl https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730 https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730 DonHopkins on May 14, 2018 [–] And with that diplomatically worded message, RMS kicked of The Infamous TCL War. That was Stallman's response to Sun bombastically pushing TCL as the official scripting language of the web, BEFORE Live Oak / Java was a widely known (or evangelized) thing. At the point anybody started talking about a Java/TCL bridge, it was already all over for TCL becoming the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Sun's unilateral anointment of TCL as the official Internet scripting language trigged RMS's "Why you should not use Tcl" message, which triggered the TCL War, which triggered Sun to switch to Java. After the TCL war finally subsided, Sun quietly pushed TCL aside and loudly evangelize Java instead. The TCL community was quite flustered and disappointed after first winning the title "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet" and then having the title yanked away and given to Java. Any talk of bridges were just table scraps for TCL, the redheaded bastard stepchild sitting outside on the back porch in the rain, smoking a cigarette and commiserating with NeWS and Self. Tom Lord's description of what happened is insightful and accurate: https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft... >The Infamous Tcl War >[...] Mr. Ousterhout had, a few years prior, developed Tcl while on the faculty of UC Berkeley - mainly, I think, to have a handy tool for other research and only secondarily as an experiment in language design. And he topped it off with Tk. Tcl/Tk took off in a huge way. It was easy to understand. The source code, written in Mr. Ousterhout's methodical and lucid style, was a joy to read. At the time, about the most convenient option for developing a GUI to run on a unix system was to write C code against the Motif toolkit - an ugly, expensive, and frequently disappointing process. With Tcl/Tk in hand, people started handing out new "mini-GUIs" for this and that, like candy. Tcl/Tk started to find application in some rather intense areas, like, for example, the "control station" software for some oil rigs. It was a smash hit. >Meanwhile, I don't think I'm letting too many cats out of the bag here, the informal Silicon Valley social network of well placed hackers were quietly and unofficially circulating some very interesting confidential whitepapers from Sun Microsystems. One of their researchers, a fellow called Mr. Gosling, had dusted off a language he'd once led the design of called "Oak". Oak was originally intended for use in embedded systems. Its basic premise was that devices ought to be Turing complete and hackable, whenever possible. Oak's approach to statically verifiable byte-code comes from that origin. Mr. Gosling came out of Carnegie Mellon University and the attiude behind Oak was popular there. As one grad student had quipped a few years earlier: "If a light switch isn't Turing Complete I don't even want to touch it." >In light of the rising star of web browsers, the folks at Sun conceived the notion of offering up a derivative of Oak to serve as the extension language for browsers. (It is probably worth mentioning here that Mr. Gosling was earlier well known for making one of the very first unix versions of Emacs.) Oak was re-named "Java" and the rest of its history is fairly well known. >I've read, since then, that up to around that point Brendan Eich had been working on a Scheme-based extension language for Netscape Navigator. Such was the power of the hegemony of the high level folks at Sun that the word came down on Mr. Eich: "Get it done. And make it look like Java." Staying true to his sense of Self, he quickly knocked out the first implementation of Mocha, later renamed Javascript. This phenomenon of Sun's hegemony influencing other firms turns out to be a small pattern, as you'll see. >Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision: >Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars. >Mr. Eich, bless his soul, brute-forced passed them, abandoning Scheme and inventing Javascript. [...]
bch 5y ago
> Ousterhout spun Tcl out of Sun in late 1997, which feels like the timeline when Sun was turning to Java. I think there was internal politicking at Sun going on too, where JOs departure wasn’t necessarily “coincidentally” when Sun was turning to Java.

jgrahamc 5y ago

I was the VP of Engineering of Ousterhout's spinout company, Scriptics, and worked for him. I don't know the story of how Sun made the decision but John has a longer History of Tcl here: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php "At the same time, it became clear that Sun needed to focus its language evangelism around Java, which was released shortly after I arrived at Sun and had become hugely popular. Though Java and Tcl are very different languages, used for very different purposes, it would have been too hard for Sun to evangelize both of them simultaneously. I came to the conclusion that, overall, Java offered more benefits for Sun than Tcl did." John was a great person to work for. He hired me despite the fact that in the interview with him I told him I'd never used Tcl and when he extolled its virtues he told me that it was "easy to learn and had powerful regular expressions" and I said "Don't those two things contradict each other?" He stopped talking and had a rather surprised expression on his face. I thought I'd blown it. Actually, I'd done the most important thing I could possibly have done: made him think something new.

rcurry 5y ago
I got exposed to TCL/TK while working for a National Lab a long time ago. At the time I was a hardcore C++ developer and after a week or two with TCL/Tk I was almost dying laughing about how easy it was to build really cool applications. I truly miss working with that platform.
- bch 5y ago
  Argonne National leaned heavily on Tcl relatively recently for a petascale super-computer project of theirs[0] (I was introduced to it by Justin Wozniak of Argonne at a Tcl conference in Manassas). [0] https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~wozniak/papers/Swift_Tcl_2015.pdf https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~wozniak/papers/Swift_Tcl_2015.pdf
EdwardCoffin 5y ago
In his google talk on the philosophy of software design, he said that the hires who worked out best for him were the ones where he just really enjoyed the conversations with them during the interviews [1] [1] https://youtu.be/bmSAYlu0NcY?t=3632 https://youtu.be/bmSAYlu0NcY?t=3632
dkarl 5y ago
There's definitely a reality split between developers who accept early in their careers that they need to learn SQL and regular expressions and developers who cling to the hope that if they hold on just a few more years they won't be important skills any more.

amitamit 5y ago

I was at Sun Labs at that time - Ousterhout's group was internally regarded as one of the top groups there. I was in a different group. My recollection is that the concerns were not around technical merit: a. Tcl and Java were positioned as competitors, b. Sun saw Java as a critical weapon in its fight against Microsoft, c. Java won the internal battle, which led to Tcl/Scriptics spin out.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
In the 90's Java did have technical merit because the Tcl of that era didn't have a bytecode interpreter. It wouldn't have been practical for the sort of low level embedded devices Sun was aiming to support with Java processors. The resources needed for dynamism is also a handicap for such platforms.

jecel 5y ago

I only watched this from the outside, but my impression was that it was an overreaction. Sun had a nice research operating system based on Java called SpringOS, but when clients heard about that they revolted. The transition from SunOS to Solaris had been traumatic and they threatened to jump ship if there would be any more changes ahead. Sun's reaction was to adopt "only Sparc, only Solaris, only Java forever and ever" as their roadmap, publicly killing SpringOS, Tcl, Self (programming language) and so on. That did make the clients happy.

shaunxcode 5y ago
to be fair to sun and Self at least a lot of the research was rolled into the hotspot stuff!
- jecel 5y ago
  They didn't do it in a smart way. Part of the Self group joined forces with some other researchers to create a company called Animorphic which would build the world's "fastest Smalltalk" using the Self technology. It was called StrongTalk and had other interesting features like optional type declaration and extensive use of traits and mixins. Given the buzz around Java they did a quick demo showing that language running on top of their technology, and in 1997 Sun bought them to use that HotSpot technology in their main Java implementation. So they paid a lot for what they previously already had but ignored.

DonHopkins 5y ago

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/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060181 pwg on May 13, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Extending Tcl Why you should not use Tcl https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730 https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730 DonHopkins on May 14, 2018 [–] And with that diplomatically worded message, RMS kicked of The Infamous TCL War. That was Stallman's response to Sun bombastically pushing TCL as the official scripting language of the web, BEFORE Live Oak / Java was a widely known (or evangelized) thing. At the point anybody started talking about a Java/TCL bridge, it was already all over for TCL becoming the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Sun's unilateral anointment of TCL as the official Internet scripting language trigged RMS's "Why you should not use Tcl" message, which triggered the TCL War, which triggered Sun to switch to Java. After the TCL war finally subsided, Sun quietly pushed TCL aside and loudly evangelize Java instead. The TCL community was quite flustered and disappointed after first winning the title "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet" and then having the title yanked away and given to Java. Any talk of bridges were just table scraps for TCL, the redheaded bastard stepchild sitting outside on the back porch in the rain, smoking a cigarette and commiserating with NeWS and Self. Tom Lord's description of what happened is insightful and accurate: https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft... >The Infamous Tcl War >[...] Mr. Ousterhout had, a few years prior, developed Tcl while on the faculty of UC Berkeley - mainly, I think, to have a handy tool for other research and only secondarily as an experiment in language design. And he topped it off with Tk. Tcl/Tk took off in a huge way. It was easy to understand. The source code, written in Mr. Ousterhout's methodical and lucid style, was a joy to read. At the time, about the most convenient option for developing a GUI to run on a unix system was to write C code against the Motif toolkit - an ugly, expensive, and frequently disappointing process. With Tcl/Tk in hand, people started handing out new "mini-GUIs" for this and that, like candy. Tcl/Tk started to find application in some rather intense areas, like, for example, the "control station" software for some oil rigs. It was a smash hit. >Meanwhile, I don't think I'm letting too many cats out of the bag here, the informal Silicon Valley social network of well placed hackers were quietly and unofficially circulating some very interesting confidential whitepapers from Sun Microsystems. One of their researchers, a fellow called Mr. Gosling, had dusted off a language he'd once led the design of called "Oak". Oak was originally intended for use in embedded systems. Its basic premise was that devices ought to be Turing complete and hackable, whenever possible. Oak's approach to statically verifiable byte-code comes from that origin. Mr. Gosling came out of Carnegie Mellon University and the attiude behind Oak was popular there. As one grad student had quipped a few years earlier: "If a light switch isn't Turing Complete I don't even want to touch it." >In light of the rising star of web browsers, the folks at Sun conceived the notion of offering up a derivative of Oak to serve as the extension language for browsers. (It is probably worth mentioning here that Mr. Gosling was earlier well known for making one of the very first unix versions of Emacs.) Oak was re-named "Java" and the rest of its history is fairly well known. >I've read, since then, that up to around that point Brendan Eich had been working on a Scheme-based extension language for Netscape Navigator. Such was the power of the hegemony of the high level folks at Sun that the word came down on Mr. Eich: "Get it done. And make it look like Java." Staying true to his sense of Self, he quickly knocked out the first implementation of Mocha, later renamed Javascript. This phenomenon of Sun's hegemony influencing other firms turns out to be a small pattern, as you'll see. >Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision: >Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars. >Mr. Eich, bless his soul, brute-forced passed them, abandoning Scheme and inventing Javascript. [...]

bch 5y ago

> Ousterhout spun Tcl out of Sun in late 1997, which feels like the timeline when Sun was turning to Java. I think there was internal politicking at Sun going on too, where JOs departure wasn’t necessarily “coincidentally” when Sun was turning to Java.