4 ms·
I remember a time when it was an honestly-debated question whether it would be TCL or Scheme that would become the universally adopted extension language for al
by bandrami 3y ago
I remember a time when it was an honestly-debated question whether it would be TCL or Scheme that would become the universally adopted extension language for all software, particularly for this new interesting technology known as the World Wide Web.
- davidw 3y agoIt's a real pity that server side Tcl wasn't more of a thing. It's a great language for it.
- lmm 3y agoAOLServer was doing async with it before most people knew what that was. Literally decades ahead of its time.
- st3fan 3y agoAOLServer (NaviServer) was awesome.
- smrtinsert 3y agoDid years of aolserver. Wrote some amazing stuff in tcl. Only python comes close lately to the power and clarity I could get with it.
- 7thaccount 3y agoDo you sometimes feel like you're living in the darkest timeline (Community Reference) or in the Star Trek timeline where the Terran Empire reigns instead of the Federation? I joke of course, but getting JavaScript instead of Scheme just seems like a let down.
- earthboundkid 3y agoStrange New Worlds has hinted that the timeline we’re on is shifted because Khan was supposed to conquer Earth in the 90s, but now it’s the 2030s due to various temporal shenanigans.
- earthboundkid 3y agoPS less than a year until the Bell Riots! https://bellriots.netlify.app/ https://bellriots.netlify.app/
- at_a_remove 3y agoI feel like if I were more coherent I could write an epic rant about how we are definitely in a bad timeline because of our technological choices. How we built the Internet "wrong" at so many little choices and now we have *waves arms about wildly* this nonsense, but I would be shouting into the wind, I think.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI'd love to read about your thoughts. Maybe it's just how it has to be due to complexity, but everything tech just feels...so wrong!
- arp242 3y agoFrom the HTML4 spec: <INPUT name="edit1" size="50"> <SCRIPT type="text/tcl"> proc edit1_changed {} { if {[edit value] == abc} { button1 enable 1 } else { button1 enable 0 } } edit1 onChange edit1_changed </SCRIPT> I did some Tcl and that went fine, but I never did enough to really have an informed opinion. I know some people really hate it though. It also has examples in VBScript and (of course) JavaScript. The W3C people did try to spec things beyond "just JS", but it was not to be.
- RHSeeger 3y ago> I did some Tcl and that went fine, but I never did enough to really have an informed opinion. I know some people really hate it though. As someone in the opposite direction, having done lots of Tcl, I love it. It is one of my favorite languages to use. I use it for simple little things on a regular basis.
- metadat 3y agoTo be honest, I wish Tcl had won out over Javascript. Somehow Tcl is less of a mindfuck for me (no offense intended to JS lovers, just a personal proclivity / preference).
- bch 3y agoI don’t recall exactly where I heard (perhaps #tcl on Freenode back in the day) that Tcl dodged a bullet by not becoming the standard, because it was left free to experiment without the responsibility of backward compatibility for the web… Though it’s still amazingly backward compatible…
- namaria 3y agoThat's the real answer to all the longing for elegance and simplicity - what could have been if Lisp had won out etc. The elegant simplicity of non standard tech is there precisely because those are non standard tech tools.
- fuzztester 3y agoDuring the dot com boom days, there was a company called Vignette, that was hiring devs to work in Tcl on web app. Might have been work using AOLServer, a web server by AOL, that could be programmed in Tcl. I remember this because I saw their job ad in a newspaper at the time. I googled a bit and found: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_Corporation Ex-CEO (later chairman) became a millionaire. Excerpt from above page: [ In June 1998, Garber hired Greg Peters to succeed him as CEO, and Garber became chairman of the board.[12] In July 1998, the company launched StoryServer 4, which featured strong support of XML technology. By December 1998, the company raised an additional $27.5 million in venture capital.[4] The number of the company's customers rose from 130 in 1998[5] to 700 in 2000.[3] On February 19, 1999, during the dot-com bubble, the company became a public company via an initial public offering. On the first day of trading, the stock price rose 152%, from $19 to $47.[13] On February 22, 1999, the company release Vignette Syndication Server. After the IPO, in 1999, Garber, worth $200 million at the age of 33, sold most of his stock and left the company.[14] ] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoryServer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoryServer
- cmacleod4 3y agoI remember people who worked with StoryServer saying Vignette had made a real mess of the integration with Tcl :-(
- fuzztester 3y agoWow, interesting. Now that I think of it, in those dot-com days, hype was flowing freely from most players' mouths and keyboards.