5 ms·

I have good feels about Tcl. How come it fell out of favor?

by LispSporks22 3y ago

Cyph0n 3y ago
Still huge in the circuit design/EDA (electronic design automation) space.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Yup, used in all the FPGA software tools. A lot of the new stuff coming out of Quartus at least is being written in Python though, or rewritten as such. Having worked in the field for the past year, I've definitely got quite a few gripes with the Tcl after some exposure. The syntax is not intuitive, especially for a scripting language. The standard library is far too small, basically just a subset of the C standard library plus regexps. The only true data types in Tcl are strings and associative arrays. As such, Tcl scripts do not scale very well. The performance is generally abysmal, not just because of the magic string conversions, but because standard library functions are incredibly slow in cases that are hard to avoid. Tcl fully parses lines before deciding that they should be executed (in the case of a command) or ignored (in the case of a comment). You should think of a comment as a "do nothing" command, rather than as a comment as in other languages. While not too egregious, if you're used to other languages that quirk causes numerous grievances. One positive is it's really easy to drop down into C or C++ when you come across tasks that make more sense in a lower-level language, so if you're using it for that purpose it's good.
  - bch 3y ago
    > Tcl fully parses lines before deciding that they should be executed (in the case of a command) or ignored (in the case of a comment). I don't know your measurements or use case but putting code in a [proc] will engage the bytecode compiler which might help you out?
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
It has some niche use-cases but I think in general it was just too awkward. "Everything is a string" kinda puts people off. Lua has similar weirdness with various aspects but it's still highly successful in other niche areas. I happen to really like Lua. But a lot of people don't like the 1-based indexing and table container can be difficult for people get wrap their head around.
- bch 3y ago
  > "Everything is a string" kinda puts people off. I can't speak for "people", but i think this might be a bit of misunderstanding combined w an implementation detail. I think most Tcl people these days would say "everything is representable as a string", which is to say types can be marshalled back/forth through a string representation. This (with other features) allows Tcl to be homoiconic[0] (it can evaluated the symbols it emits itself). Pre-8[1] (1997/1998(?)) Tcl internals did also indeed use char* strings to do its own work parsing/evaluating, but Tcl8 brought in so called Tcl_Obj structures w "dual ported" values that keep the iconic string representation available, as well as a native value (ie: integer when using the value as an integer, so you wouldnt need to do something like atoi() on a string rep when you wanted to do math). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity [1] https://tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.0.html https://tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.0.html
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Semantically everything is a string, even if they have performance optimisations to make that slightly less insane. Performance is only one of the issues with "everything is a string". Bug-proneness is probably a bigger issue and you can't fix that with optimisations.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  Yes, it makes debugging a large or distributed TCL application hellish. Once you have had to deal with that, you will be put off of TCL for life.
- canadianfella 3y ago
lockhouse 3y ago
I think there were several factors. While Tk (one of Tcl’s major killer apps) looked good on Windows and Mac, it retained the Motif look and feel for too long on UNIX platforms. This gave the impression of it being obsolete technology and made many people dismiss it for use in serious applications. It lacked a major company championing and investing in it. Its creator Dr. Ousterhout, moved onto other projects. Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP won out on the scripting language popularity contest at the expense of Perl and Tcl. Richard Stallman had very strong opinions about Tcl that also did it no favors. This was known as the “Tcl War.” https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
- IshKebab 3y ago
  > If Tcl does become the "standard scripting language", users will curse it for years--the way people curse Fortran, MSDOS, Unix shell syntax, and other de facto standards they feel stuck with. Hear hear. Just Bash left to kill (and TCL in EDA but I won't hold my breath there - hardware people think they aren't software engineers so they don't care about software quality).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- zerr 3y ago
  So the Lisp-like is Guile. Did they ever come up with the second (algebraic) language?
orthoxerox 3y ago
It spent too long actually storing everything as strings internally. When tcl 8 was finally released in 1999, tcl already had a reputation, people have been writing cgi-bin scripts in Perl for 6 years already and PHP was on the rise. Homoiconicity is cool, but cool doesn't necessarily mean useful.
nobleach 3y ago
I still recall coming across the "Sams Teach Yourself Tcl/Tk in 24 Hours" book at my office. I had been doing Linux Samba administration at that time and some of the tooling was written in tcl. So I brought the book home. It was the first time I had ever doing any GUI stuff that wasn't Delphi/VB/FoxPro! I loved it! I quickly realized I had nothing interesting I needed to build at that moment... so I put it back down. But just realizing that GUI programming was in reach without all the heavy Win32/GDI or Winforms, was so cool.
- zerr 3y ago
  I felt the same, but with GTK.
IshKebab 3y ago
We got much better options... Basically anything really but even not-very-good languages like JavaScript and Python are significantly better than TCL. The only thing that TCL really beats is Bash. If you are restricted to easily embeddable languages then the options are much more limited, but even so there are obviously better options like Lua, or even rolling your own (e.g. GDScript, QuakeC). The only people still using TCL are those that can't leave 90% in the past, e.g. the entire EDA industry.
ncr100 3y ago
I am tickled to see this, first Redis implementation in TCL. TCL was (is?) slow and there was not the userbase that needed it, at the time, in my view. Maybe now with more diverse programmers addressing more diverse use-cases with their software, TCL can be more relevant.
sokoloff 3y ago
I've written a lot of Tcl in my career. I don't know if it "fell out of favor" as much as "never really had a ton of favor even at its peak". I have used it in the last decade to do some build system tooling where string/regex processing of log files emitted in prior steps was a big part of the functionality. It was nice that "nobody else is using Tcl, so I won't have any versioning conflicts" and that held true for over a decade, so the long-term cost was reasonable. If I had to learn a new language today, I can't say that I'd put Tcl very high on the list, despite being overall happy with it.
Gordonjcp 3y ago
VHS vs. Beta, basically. Tcl and Perl are about the same age, approximately similar in function, approximately similar in ease-of-use, and really the world could have gone either way. Just as with VHS and Beta, each had their strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately it came down to an avalanche of the "network effect" - everyone was using VHS so everyone used VHS / everyone was using Perl so everyone used Perl.
davidw 3y ago
I have some thoughts about that, as someone who had a small role in that community: https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went...
themerone 3y ago
I read an opinion that the TCL community was divided into two factions. One faction wanted a lua like small embeddable interpreter. The other wanted a full feature Python like platform. Neither faction won, so TCL got stuck in the middle. I don't know if this is true, but it was such an interesting opinion, that it stuck with me.

I have good feels about Tcl. How come it fell out of favor?

Cyph0n 3y ago

Still huge in the circuit design/EDA (electronic design automation) space.

Aromasin 3y ago
Yup, used in all the FPGA software tools. A lot of the new stuff coming out of Quartus at least is being written in Python though, or rewritten as such. Having worked in the field for the past year, I've definitely got quite a few gripes with the Tcl after some exposure. The syntax is not intuitive, especially for a scripting language. The standard library is far too small, basically just a subset of the C standard library plus regexps. The only true data types in Tcl are strings and associative arrays. As such, Tcl scripts do not scale very well. The performance is generally abysmal, not just because of the magic string conversions, but because standard library functions are incredibly slow in cases that are hard to avoid. Tcl fully parses lines before deciding that they should be executed (in the case of a command) or ignored (in the case of a comment). You should think of a comment as a "do nothing" command, rather than as a comment as in other languages. While not too egregious, if you're used to other languages that quirk causes numerous grievances. One positive is it's really easy to drop down into C or C++ when you come across tasks that make more sense in a lower-level language, so if you're using it for that purpose it's good.
- bch 3y ago
  > Tcl fully parses lines before deciding that they should be executed (in the case of a command) or ignored (in the case of a comment). I don't know your measurements or use case but putting code in a [proc] will engage the bytecode compiler which might help you out?

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

It has some niche use-cases but I think in general it was just too awkward. "Everything is a string" kinda puts people off. Lua has similar weirdness with various aspects but it's still highly successful in other niche areas. I happen to really like Lua. But a lot of people don't like the 1-based indexing and table container can be difficult for people get wrap their head around.

bch 3y ago
> "Everything is a string" kinda puts people off. I can't speak for "people", but i think this might be a bit of misunderstanding combined w an implementation detail. I think most Tcl people these days would say "everything is representable as a string", which is to say types can be marshalled back/forth through a string representation. This (with other features) allows Tcl to be homoiconic[0] (it can evaluated the symbols it emits itself). Pre-8[1] (1997/1998(?)) Tcl internals did also indeed use char* strings to do its own work parsing/evaluating, but Tcl8 brought in so called Tcl_Obj structures w "dual ported" values that keep the iconic string representation available, as well as a native value (ie: integer when using the value as an integer, so you wouldnt need to do something like atoi() on a string rep when you wanted to do math). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity [1] https://tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.0.html https://tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.0.html
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Semantically everything is a string, even if they have performance optimisations to make that slightly less insane. Performance is only one of the issues with "everything is a string". Bug-proneness is probably a bigger issue and you can't fix that with optimisations.
jollyllama 3y ago
Yes, it makes debugging a large or distributed TCL application hellish. Once you have had to deal with that, you will be put off of TCL for life.
canadianfella 3y ago

lockhouse 3y ago

I think there were several factors. While Tk (one of Tcl’s major killer apps) looked good on Windows and Mac, it retained the Motif look and feel for too long on UNIX platforms. This gave the impression of it being obsolete technology and made many people dismiss it for use in serious applications. It lacked a major company championing and investing in it. Its creator Dr. Ousterhout, moved onto other projects. Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP won out on the scripting language popularity contest at the expense of Perl and Tcl. Richard Stallman had very strong opinions about Tcl that also did it no favors. This was known as the “Tcl War.” https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/

IshKebab 3y ago
> If Tcl does become the "standard scripting language", users will curse it for years--the way people curse Fortran, MSDOS, Unix shell syntax, and other de facto standards they feel stuck with. Hear hear. Just Bash left to kill (and TCL in EDA but I won't hold my breath there - hardware people think they aren't software engineers so they don't care about software quality).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
zerr 3y ago
So the Lisp-like is Guile. Did they ever come up with the second (algebraic) language?

orthoxerox 3y ago

It spent too long actually storing everything as strings internally. When tcl 8 was finally released in 1999, tcl already had a reputation, people have been writing cgi-bin scripts in Perl for 6 years already and PHP was on the rise. Homoiconicity is cool, but cool doesn't necessarily mean useful.

nobleach 3y ago

I still recall coming across the "Sams Teach Yourself Tcl/Tk in 24 Hours" book at my office. I had been doing Linux Samba administration at that time and some of the tooling was written in tcl. So I brought the book home. It was the first time I had ever doing any GUI stuff that wasn't Delphi/VB/FoxPro! I loved it! I quickly realized I had nothing interesting I needed to build at that moment... so I put it back down. But just realizing that GUI programming was in reach without all the heavy Win32/GDI or Winforms, was so cool.

zerr 3y ago
I felt the same, but with GTK.

IshKebab 3y ago

We got much better options... Basically anything really but even not-very-good languages like JavaScript and Python are significantly better than TCL. The only thing that TCL really beats is Bash. If you are restricted to easily embeddable languages then the options are much more limited, but even so there are obviously better options like Lua, or even rolling your own (e.g. GDScript, QuakeC). The only people still using TCL are those that can't leave 90% in the past, e.g. the entire EDA industry.

ncr100 3y ago

I am tickled to see this, first Redis implementation in TCL. TCL was (is?) slow and there was not the userbase that needed it, at the time, in my view. Maybe now with more diverse programmers addressing more diverse use-cases with their software, TCL can be more relevant.

sokoloff 3y ago

I've written a lot of Tcl in my career. I don't know if it "fell out of favor" as much as "never really had a ton of favor even at its peak". I have used it in the last decade to do some build system tooling where string/regex processing of log files emitted in prior steps was a big part of the functionality. It was nice that "nobody else is using Tcl, so I won't have any versioning conflicts" and that held true for over a decade, so the long-term cost was reasonable. If I had to learn a new language today, I can't say that I'd put Tcl very high on the list, despite being overall happy with it.

Gordonjcp 3y ago

VHS vs. Beta, basically. Tcl and Perl are about the same age, approximately similar in function, approximately similar in ease-of-use, and really the world could have gone either way. Just as with VHS and Beta, each had their strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately it came down to an avalanche of the "network effect" - everyone was using VHS so everyone used VHS / everyone was using Perl so everyone used Perl.

davidw 3y ago

I have some thoughts about that, as someone who had a small role in that community: https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went...

themerone 3y ago

I read an opinion that the TCL community was divided into two factions. One faction wanted a lua like small embeddable interpreter. The other wanted a full feature Python like platform. Neither faction won, so TCL got stuck in the middle. I don't know if this is true, but it was such an interesting opinion, that it stuck with me.