3 ms·

I think this debate, also known at the "Ousterhout dichotomy" [1], has been moot for many years. (I believe, though, it was relevant when initially stated, i.e.

• DonHopkins 3y ago
  >History >The dichotomy was fully set out in Ousterhout (1998), though Ousterhout had drawn this distinction since at least the design of Tcl (1988), and had stated it publicly at various times. An early episode was "The Tcl War" of late September and October 1994, where Richard Stallman posted an article critical of Tcl, entitled "Why you should not use Tcl",[2] to which Ousterhout replied with an articulation of his dichotomy:[3] >I think that Stallman's objections to Tcl may stem largely from one aspect of Tcl's design that he either doesn't understand or doesn't agree with. This is the proposition that you should use two languages for a large software system: one, such as C or C++, for manipulating the complex internal data structures where performance is key, and another, such as Tcl, for writing small-ish scripts that tie together the C pieces and are used for extensions. More on The TCL War: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 >dasht on April 14, 2010 | parent | context | favorite | on: Guile - The Failed Universal Scripting Language >Huh. Well, that's me (Tom Lord). So, what can I add here for HN? >Some of the comments talk about Andy Wingo's good work and leadership in recent years. I agree. Of course, Guile was once my baby, long ago, complete with sleepless nights and other trappings of nervous parenthood. Consequently, I see almost all of the big technical changes made to Guile recently as The Wrong Way. But that's a purely personal, emotional reaction; objectively I see that he's doing good work. >Guile failed / stalled for a few years there. It's a bit hard to talk about why. I'll say a few words about it and also point to a link with a an alternative telling of the same tale. >Guile got started after some earlier, failed attempts to write a Scheme extension language library for Scheme. There were two earlier attempts that I know of: one called "revoc" (read it backwards) and the other had no name but happened as part of an early GNU spreadsheet project. >I went to work for a start-up that, then, had something like 30 employees. It was an unusual start-up for its day for the software part of all of their products was free software. The Linux kernel didn't exist when the company was founded and it barely existed when I first started at that firm. >The firm was Cygnus, of course. Back then it was called "Cygnus Support". >Cygnus got it into its collective head, for a short period of time, to build a general purpose user interface toolkit for writing GUI apps -- and to make this GUI toolkit Scheme-based and to write GUI apps that were architecturally similar to GNU Emacs, but with fancier graphics and interaction. Building that thing was to be my job. >To save time I started with Aubrey Jaffer's Scheme implementation called SCM. I forked SCM and began radically modifying it to make it more useful as a library and to add various desirable features. I wrote a C library for Guile to give it a generic window system interface, providing an X11 implementation of that library. Towards the end, I had much of the heavy lifting of the toolkit done and perhaps another 6-12 months before a real product. In my toolkit I even had a basic Emacs-like program except with features that Emacs lacked at the time like support for multiple-font text and proportionally spaced fonts. It was kind of neat because nearly all of the redisplay code, and all of the code for "text widgets", was written in Scheme - and yet performed reasonably well on even the slow machines of the time. It was a very "hackable", fun, toolkit. >Alas, there were political problems. The sales staff at Cygnus, especially, were displeased that the project was taking so long: they had been hoping to have GUIs to show at trade-shows mere months after I started. The famous "Tcl Wars" happened and that led to some political infighting within Cygnus. Cygnus was seeking a next round of VC funding and there was pressure to cut the Guile project from the budget. Most annoyingly, my boss at the end showed me a contract he'd negotiated to help fund Guile work and asked me to approve it. I felt that the contract had some severe problems and would need to be fixed before I could agree to it - he'd negotiated it without any input from me. The next day he signed the contract. About a week later I felt duty bound to quit (because of the contract and because of some bullshit issues about my working remotely). The demise of the Guile project at Cygnus was a profoundly unpleasant experience. >Quitting, at that time, was a somewhat crazy step to take. We parted on less than friendly terms. I had been accustomed to job searching in the Silicon Valley, back in those days, this way: you call a few recruiters; you fax or email them your resume; you have phone calls for a few days; you get some interviews; you take your next job. The Valley was, truly, the Garden of Earthly Delights for a hacker in those boom years. This time was different. I spoke to several otherwise decent recruiters who all quickly, and to my surprise, made it clear to me that each and every one had been warned away from me by people close to Cygnus. >Some people will tell you that the Silicon Valley elites back then did not secretly blacklist people from employment. Those people are variously mistaken or lying. Get on the wrong side of a couple of those elites and, in my experience - that was it. You're out. The U-Haul place is down the street. On-ramp to highway 80 is over there. Get out of town. See you in the next life. >Shortly after that I had to abandon my status as the GNU Guile maintainer (at status conveyed by the FSF, not Cygnus) for financial reasons: I was busy working out some way to keep a roof over my family's head. The project was taken over by one of the "revoc" developers about whose work on it, during that period, I have nothing nice to say. >Within those next few years the Linux kernel's foothold got quite strong. The FSF greatly diminished its efforts to build a "complete GNU system" and, rather than making sure lots of interactive applications were extensible in the style of Emacs, the GNU project became more of a follower than a leader. >In those same next few years, a faction of people close to Cygnus who had first hostilely forked GCC then forced its maintainership away from the FSF. >Overall, the FSF became far less proactive at software development and the original "vision" of a lisp-centric improved version of unix fell by the wayside. One of the last big actions from GNU was to endorse an alternative GUI app framework - GNOME - on the grounds that at least it didn't have the licensing problems that, at the time, KDE had. Any remaining hope of directly developing the lisp-style environment we'd started out to build evaporated right there. >Here is a different version of some part of the same story (also as told by me, and why should you believe me? :-) http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html >(Where did I go after Cygnus? After several agonizing months I landed a job working remotely for an R&D group at UUNET. That was a gig that went very well for a couple of years. You know, until it was suddenly revealed that the firm was bankrupt and that it's CEO was being arrested. I tell ya', I can't catch a break. ;-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 >DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Tcl War (1994) >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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061858 >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. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29379272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29379272 >DonHopkins on Nov 29, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: CPython's main branch running in the browser with ... >For Netscape in 1995, I believe Python would have been a better choice than JavaScript, but Lua would have been an even better choice, given how much smaller, simpler, and more efficient Lua is, and the eventual excellence of LuaJIT. (If only Lua indexed its array from 0 instead of 1...) >But Python and Lua didn't "look like Java" enough for Netscape. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30405409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30405409 >DonHopkins on Feb 20, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Fengari – Lua for the Browser >I wish Netscape had chosen Lua instead of bothering to invent JavaScript. Python would have also been much better than JavaScript, but Lua would have been perfect. But at least they didn't choose TCL, as Sun was pushing before they switched gears to Java after the Great TCL War. And personally, I would have preferred PostScript (which was the basis of NeWS, with a Smalltalk-like OOP system) or ScriptX (which was like Scheme or Dylan with "normal" infix syntax and a CLOS-like OOP system) to JavaScript. >If all the time and effort and treasure that was wasted cobbling together JavaScript from scratch with all its naive unforced design flaws and security holes and interoperability issues -- and then everyone else pissing away so much effort working around and fixing subtle bugs in JavaScript code due to those terrible design flaws (cough cough "this" cough cough "equality") -- had been put into Lua instead, which was cleanly designed from the start by incredibly smart people who actually had a clue about what they were doing, the world would be a much better place. >People who are that confused about equality shouldn't design programming languages: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ >"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." -George Orwell, Animal Farm [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117713 >DonHopkins on April 22, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Birth of Tcl >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 https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730 https://wiki.tcl.tk/16730 [...]