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> 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 opp

> 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 ago
To 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    That'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.
- pmontra 3y ago
  No major browser ever shipped with a Tcl interpreter as far as I can remember. By major I mean Netscape and IE. All of them had a JavaScript interpreter. It was a battle that never happened because it couldn't be fought. Maybe there was a chance in server side software, where JavaScript has not been an option until Node.js. Java and PHP won the server post 1995 and Perl did it before them. Desktop side, the browser + HTML + JavaScript won the desktop, served from either Java or PHP or ASP, then from one of the other post 2005 stacks.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Server-side JavaScript was part of the Netscape stack already in 1997. Here’s a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Netscape-Server-Side-Javascript-Applications/dp/1566047455 https://www.amazon.com/Official-Netscape-Server-Side-Javascr...
    - pmontra 3y ago
      I remember that product but it was as slow as molasses. You could run Java on the same hardware and be reasonably fast.
  - RHSeeger 3y ago
    There is/was a plugin for client side Tcl, the Tcl/Tk Tclet Plugin, originally released during the 1990s. It filled the same role as Javascript; but never really gained popularity.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    Not with the browser, but there was a TCL runtime you could download to run TCLets from web servers. I had a few contracts for that; some intranets made heavy use of it.

metadat 3y ago

To 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 ago
I 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 ago
  That'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.
pmontra 3y ago
No major browser ever shipped with a Tcl interpreter as far as I can remember. By major I mean Netscape and IE. All of them had a JavaScript interpreter. It was a battle that never happened because it couldn't be fought. Maybe there was a chance in server side software, where JavaScript has not been an option until Node.js. Java and PHP won the server post 1995 and Perl did it before them. Desktop side, the browser + HTML + JavaScript won the desktop, served from either Java or PHP or ASP, then from one of the other post 2005 stacks.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Server-side JavaScript was part of the Netscape stack already in 1997. Here’s a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Netscape-Server-Side-Javascript-Applications/dp/1566047455 https://www.amazon.com/Official-Netscape-Server-Side-Javascr...
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I remember that product but it was as slow as molasses. You could run Java on the same hardware and be reasonably fast.
- RHSeeger 3y ago
  There is/was a plugin for client side Tcl, the Tcl/Tk Tclet Plugin, originally released during the 1990s. It filled the same role as Javascript; but never really gained popularity.
- bandrami 3y ago
  Not with the browser, but there was a TCL runtime you could download to run TCLets from web servers. I had a few contracts for that; some intranets made heavy use of it.