7 ms·

A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)

147 points by breck 2y ago

abhgh 2y ago
John Ousterhout also was leading a project called RAMcloud (I thought was interesting) that the article doesn't mention - [1], [2]. Also, he has a book on s/w design [3] which is short and nice, and is more of a collection of ideas rather than an approach, which I highly recommend. [1] RAMcloud talk by J. Ousterhout:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcUvU3b5co8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcUvU3b5co8 [2] RAMcloud paper: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/ramcloud.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/ramcloud.pdf [3] A Philosophy of Software Design, https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John-Ousterhout/dp/1732102201 https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John-Ouste...
- 8s2ngy 2y ago
  +1 for 'A Philosophy of Software Design.' I read that book a while ago and really liked his views on a lot of things. Off the top of my head some of them are: complexity being the greatest enemy of software engineers, the importance of strategic programming (as opposed to tacit 'somehow-get-the-job-done' programming), general-purpose abstractions, and having deep modules exposed through simple interfaces.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    +1 One of the only books on design which actually is backed up by data. I had been misled by the Ruby ecosystem earlier in my career to do clean code + refactoring + tdd and this book + actually looking at complex systems such as games made me realize that coding is not about abstractions but it is about data and what the computer needs to do.
    - jasinjames 2y ago
      In your view, what word(s) would you use to describe the following? "a carefully designed API for interacting with piece of data which provides both a consistent technical interface and conceptual understanding of the meaning of said thing" The reason I ask is because the word I've always used for that is "abstraction", but I'm getting the sense that over-abstracted and over-architected frameworks has soured many people to the word. I want to communicate the idea without conjuring up images of java classes with 90 character names. What would you recommend?
      - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
        You are absolutely right. In that sense the right abstraction is what one should go after. But what I mean is the more popular Java / OOP style abstractions like a repository which returns a builder which returns class which you new up and pass to some sort of super interface and its just such a mess. As a technology I really like the JVM and hotspot but good Lord if I have to wade through 10 different things to get there. Finally to answer your question I have started using the actual name of the thing in the language I'm using. Such as a "struct" in c and rust which I mostly use these days.
- random_coder 2y ago
  Also, a co-author of the Raft consensus algorithm.
hangonhn 2y ago
Wasn’t he also one of the creators of RAFT (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) )
b112 2y ago
Thanks John, I've kicked many a people from IRC using TCL.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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surfingdino 2y ago
Tcl "powers" the internet in a non-direct way since it is used in Cisco IOS.
- rwmj 2y ago
  And every proprietary EDA tool in the world too.
  - bch 2y ago
    ...and a10/F5 aFleX/iRules[0][1], and the scripting in Tealeaf[2][3], ... [0] https://www.a10networks.com/blog/aflex-tutorial/ https://www.a10networks.com/blog/aflex-tutorial/ [1] https://community.f5.com/kb/technicalarticles/irules-concepts-tcl-the-how-and-why/275910 https://community.f5.com/kb/technicalarticles/irules-concept... [2] https://www.acoustic.com/tealeaf https://www.acoustic.com/tealeaf [3] https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043785173-Example-TLSessioning-configuration https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043785173-E...
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    ...unfortunately. I guess to be fair if it hadn't been TCL they would have chosen something even worse.
    - surfingdino 2y ago
      I guess Lua wasn't available at the time.
- latenightcoding 2y ago
  Chez Scheme too then!
zakirullin 2y ago
He is an absolutely amazing and extremely humble person. He agreed to review my article (written under the influence of his book) in his spare time. He does tons of code reviews every week for his students as well. I was especially impressed by his notion of "deep modules" in "A Philosophy of Software Design". The idea is extremely not-popular, but really sound and practical. I would definitely go for this book instead of "Clean Code" and such. His book is so fundamental, and it goes far beyond the overused and vague "complexity" term.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  Any tldr for “deep modules”?
  - zakirullin 2y ago
    Deep module - simple interface, complex functionality Shallow module - interface is relatively complex to the small functionality it provides. Shallow modules don't hide as much complexity. https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load?#too-many-small-methods-classes-or-modules https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load?#too-many-small... But I highly recommend picking up the book :) It is an enjoyable read.
    - Scarblac 2y ago
      IIRC, the deep/shallow thing is anout how much functionality there is, and he used wide/narrow for the size of the API? So that the goal is to have deep, narrow modules: modules that have a lot of functionality hidden behibd a small API.
      - v9v 2y ago
        I think a good example of this concept is the foreach command in Tcl: It's quite flexible compared to list iteration constructs found in most languages. This is normal usage: foreach x {1 2} {puts $x} => 1 2 You can iterate over two lists at once: foreach x {1 2} y {3 4} {puts $x $y} => 1 3 2 4 Instead of reading one element from the list, you can read multiple: foreach {x1 x2} {1 2 3 4} y {5 6} {puts $x1 $x2 $y} => 1 2 5 3 4 6 If any of the lists happen to run out before the others, instead of complaining it just returns empty elements. Many commands in Tcl give the impression that they can be used in many different ways, so writing a program in Tcl feels like building a structure by creatively assembling a limited set of legos.
throwaway81523 2y ago
I never liked tcl but the implementation was definitely small, which mattered more back then than it does now. Does anyone still care about it? These days what we really need is an easily embeddable Python. Guile is very nice if you want a somewhat fancy Scheme system, but it got out of control if all you wanted was something light and embeddable.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  I guess Lua remains the chief goto for light embedded scripting environment, doesn't it?
- dunham 2y ago
  I believe lua is often used in this role these days. I've gotten the impression that it is light and easy to integrate, but I haven't tried it myself.
  - throwaway81523 2y ago
    Yes, Lua is quite easy to embed and is popular in game development for that reason. It appears in a few other applications like Redis as well. But, in the big picture, it's a weird language that is not very popular. People want Python and/or Javascript, and JS is awful, so that leaves Python ;).
    - f1shy 2y ago
      I do bot understand the downvotes. Maybe because of wording “weird”. Give me a break, I think it has a point: much more people can do Python as Lua. I do like Lua, but if I just try to use it in my work, I would be paria.
      - throwaway81523 2y ago
        I had figured people didn't like the dig at JS. Unfortunately the WAT video is no longer on youtube. It might be on destroyallsoftware.com.
bch 2y ago
JO is giant in the industry; a longtime working professional with fantastic pedagogical chops. In my opinion, if he's talking, I'm listening.
lizknope 2y ago
I tried learning Motif to write X11 graphical programs in 1994. Another student in the computer lab told me about Tcl / Tk. It was far easier. Then I got a job in the semiconductor design industry in 1997. The next year the leading EDA companies Cadence and Synopsys started using Tcl as the internal scripting language for the tools. So now it is 2024 and our CAD flows are tens of thousands of lines of Tcl code. Every week I still write Tcl code to generate reports or automate something.
- nequo 2y ago
  What have been the pros and cons of Tcl for you, compared with other scripting languages if you have experience with them?
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Here's a transcript of a keynote I gave to the Toronto Usenix symposium, where I talked about the pros and cons of TCL/Tk, from developing multi-player SimCity with it around 1993. A lot has changed since then, but in 1993 it was so much better than Motif and every other alternative in so many ways. https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/keynote.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/keynote.html >Hello, my name is Don Hopkins, and I ported SimCity to Unix on top of X11 using the TCL/Tk toolkit, and also on top of the NeWS window system using HyperLook. Unfortunately I can't be in Toronto to demonstrate this stuff to you, but fortunately I have some video tapes that you can see that demonstrate the whole system. >The X11 version of SimCity is multi player, and several people can join the game, and cooperate, and people draw roads, and put down buildings in different places, and then when you do something important, like change the tax rate, or build an airport, you have to get everybody else who's playing to agree where to put it, and which thing to put down. So it makes you slow down and rationalize what you're doing, and explain to people why it is you want to put it there. It's a really interesting addition to SimCity because it adds politics. >I'm going to show first the X11 version, which is on top of TCL/Tk, and that's a free toolkit that's available, written by John Ousterhaut at Berkeley. There's a book that's coming out describing it, and you can just get TCL/Tk and use it to make products for free. You don't have to pay anything for it, and it's actually very good code. It really beats the pants off of Motif, and we were able to modify it in order to support things like colormaps and multiple displays the way we needed to, and add things to it like a sound server to make sound effects, and pie menus for quickly selecting city editing tools. TCL/Tk made alot of sense for SimCity. [...] >HyperLook has this scripting language in it, and TCL/Tk has the TCL scripting language in it, so I was able to translate the things I had written in PostScript into TCL, and have a very similar structure. It makes it much easier to develop a thing as complex as SimCity if you have an interpretive programming language there, so you can just fiddle around, and paste new function definitions into the running system. >There are some user interface editors that have been developed for TCL/Tk, but I just wrote code by hand because I was doing some more specialized things, like multiple views and putting up views on different X11 displays over the net, that the user interface editors didn't support. HyperLook has a built in user interface editor, and I'll demonstrate HyperLook SimCity and the HyperLook environment in the following video tape. [...] >One of the things I developed for TCL/Tk and for HyperLook was this sound mixer server. And then we got an NCD X-Terminal, and just layered my sound mixer on top of their sound server. It can either use the built-in audio device and be a TCL sound server, or it can use the sound server that's in your X-Terminal or your Sun or SGI or whatever, if you're running NetAudio. [...] >For the pie menus and the multi player interaction stuff, like putting up windows on different screens and letting people have a shared view of this one environment, it was really nice to have the source code to the TCL/Tk toolkit, in order to support that kind of stuff. >It wouldn't have been possible to port SimCity to X11 using Open Software Foundation's Motif toolkit. It just absolutely sucks. It's not open, and you have to pay for the source code, and it's not being maintained. >But there's a really wonderful community that's grown around TCL/Tk, and people are allowed to use it in their products for free, and get the source code. I implemented pie menus with TCL/Tk for SimCity, and out of gratitude, I put the source code for the pie menu module out for other people to use, just to help to community. It's a nice positive feedback situation, as opposed to the cold war situation you have with COSE, Motif, and Open Software Foundation. >We bundled the HyperLook runtime system with the NeWS version of SimCity. If you're running OpenWindows 3.0, you can get it and try it out. [...]
spacedcowboy 2y ago
Also responsible for Magic [1],[2] which is the basis (AFAIK) for the efabless route to getting your own chip designed these days... I ported it to the Mac and played with it a while back with the intention of making my own chip, but priorities changed when my wife fell very ill. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(software) [2] http://opencircuitdesign.com/magic/ http://opencircuitdesign.com/magic/
bch 2y ago
TFA mentions the Sprite operating system, which brought us a few things, including (i recently discovered), pmake[0] (by way of Adam de Boor[1]) which was an early instance of parallelizing make(1), and begat BSD Make[2], which is lovely to use. [0] https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/spriteRetrospective.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/spriteRetrospective... [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-de-boor-4293a1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-de-boor-4293a1/ [2] https://man.netbsd.org/make.1 https://man.netbsd.org/make.1
ofalkaed 2y ago
I just recently started learning tcl/tk out of frustration with the other options for gui toolkits. Liking it quite a bit now that I have gotten over the hurdle of figuring out the sense of tcl which often felt like nonsense at the start. TK is especially nice, very easy to work with.
- kragen 2y ago
  tk is still excellent, tcl is mediocre
monkeydust 2y ago
I remember early in my career working at an investment bank on the trading floor as a support analyst. I was asked by a very frustrated trader to modify the behaviour of one of the trading apps.. basically he shouted..."just figure it out". Yea he was bit of a twat but then trading desks have changed a lot today. The app was from a 3rd party provider and making changes would take time of course, then they told me I could do this myself with Tcl. So in a day I figured out Tcl, made the change and it was in production the next day. Of course doing that now would be impossible but I remember the buzz from being able to make a real world change so damn fast.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
OhMeadhbh 2y ago
Perfect timing. I ordered a copy of "A Philosophy of Software Design" a week ago and it arrived yesterday. I'm going to start reading it tonight, but this is a nice preface, I bet. Several months ago a friend encouraged me to look at Tcl again (independent of Tk.) Mixins, regexes, reflection. All stuff I didn't appreciate in the early 90s. And I had reason to look at Minix a few years back. Ousterhout definitely did some good work. I think he might have been just a little bit ahead of the rest of us.
- kragen 2y ago
  it didn't have mixins in the early 90s tcl's model of what data is doesn't accommodate general graphs, just trees. you can make a hash table but not a hash table of hash tables. on the plus side you won't have aliasing bugs like python's notorious matrix = [[0] * width] * height because its data model is so weak, you routinely resort to reflection to get things done, which makes it really hard to maintain tcl programs of any depth
- leetrout 2y ago
  It is a phenomenal book for what it is. It was the required reading for the class I taught at UNC in 2019. I am teaching a workshop in September and bought a copy for every attendee because I believe it is that important for people to be exposed to his ideas and how he approaches things. I was also impressed with "Righting Software" and the premise of volatility based decomposition but it is not nearly as approachable as Ousterhout's book.
EdwardCoffin 2y ago
If you want a more substantial interview with John Ousterhout, I highly recommend his hour-long talk at google A Philosophy of Software Design, which is essentially a synopsis of his book by the same title. Edit: I guess not an interview, but he does answer some questions from the audience at the end. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY
chrisrickard 2y ago
Tcl was the scripting language in the mIRC IRC client, and as a 13 year old, my first foray into programming. I started writing little scripts to boot annoying people off IRC, but ended up caring more about coding than IRC politics - and ended up writing a full blown Napster clone in Tcl. I feel like I owe my career to Tcl opening these doors for me - so thank you John.
- waitwhats 2y ago
  mIRC has it's own scripting language that doesn't have to do with Tcl. Maybe you are talking about eggdrop IRC bot that uses Tcl as its scripting language - but then your comment and attribution doesn't really make sense.
  - mjard 2y ago
    Xircon was a windows IRC client that used TCL for scripting.
kragen 2y ago
a lot of people here are wondering if tcl is something they should check out. tcl has some serious flaws, but some real merits as well. the best and most balanced answer to this question is https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html, which explains some of the reasons i used to really enjoy tcl, before i gave it up for more capable languages maybe the nucleus of kreinin's argument is > So basically, pop infix languages (and I use the term in the most non-judgmental, factual way), pop infix languages are optimized for programming (duh, they are programming languages). Programming is definitions. Define a variable and it will be easy to use it, and computing hairy expressions from variables is also easy. Tcl is optimized for usage. Most of the time, users give simple commands. Command names and literal parameters are easy. If you are a sophisticated user, and you want to do pmem 0 bkpt [expr [pmem 0 pc] + 1], go ahead and do it. A bit ugly, but on the other hand, simple commands are really, really simple. > And eventually, simple commands become all that matters for the user, because the sophisticated user grows personal shortcuts, which abstract away variables and expressions, so you end up with pmem 0 bkpt nextpc or something. Apparently, flat function calls with literal arguments is what interactive program usage is all about. the stallman/ousterhout debate on usenet back in the 90s (from which guile sprang) may be interesting reading, but i think kreinin's post linked above has more deep insights
msephton 2y ago
Tcl has been a staple on Mac for over 30 years at this point, since System 7 at least. It was installed in Mac OS X as standard, not sure if it still is these days. I use it to wrangle text directory listings from old Macintosh CD-ROMs from pre-Unicode era. The character set support and conversion code seems to have been written by Apple themselves in the mid-1990s. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2022/03/31/working-with-classic-macintosh-text-encodings-in-the-age-of-unicode/ https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2022/03/31/working-with-clas... I was pleasantly surprised by the syntax and capability of Tcl as well as the fact that it's still being developed and supported and that the maintainers took my feature requests and bug reports seriously and actioned them in what I consider a short time.
- breck 2y ago
  > It was installed in Mac OS X as standard, not sure if it still is these days. It is! Just type "tclsh"
  - brnt 2y ago
    However, the Tk install that Macos ships with is so broken there's even a warning about it on the Tcl website (or was it the Python website, in case you try to use Tkinter on system Python). Invisible text, invisible buttons, Apple's got you covered....
  - msephton 2y ago
    Interesting, I am using a self-installed version for ...reasons.
    - breck 2y ago
      Would love to read more. Also: > This site is powered by Jekyll (but, I absolutely definitely do not recommend it) Can I recommend Scroll to you (https://scroll.pub/ https://scroll.pub/). It's not good yet, but should be great in 3 - 6 months. P.S. Loving your blog
      - 2y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
I want something like a "RAMcloud" for home use. A computer with more RAM than secondary storage that boots from USB and no pre-installed corporate OS.
dang 2y ago
Related: A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34733120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34733120 - Feb 2023 (92 comments)
hejira 2y ago
I can also very much recommend his book about programming methodology. Lots of good sane advice there for anyone wanting to learn more about structuring code and keeping everything readable and bug free.

147 points by breck 2y ago

John Ousterhout also was leading a project called RAMcloud (I thought was interesting) that the article doesn't mention - [1], [2]. Also, he has a book on s/w design [3] which is short and nice, and is more of a collection of ideas rather than an approach, which I highly recommend. [1] RAMcloud talk by J. Ousterhout:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcUvU3b5co8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcUvU3b5co8 [2] RAMcloud paper: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/ramcloud.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/ramcloud.pdf [3] A Philosophy of Software Design, https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John-Ousterhout/dp/1732102201 https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John-Ouste...

8s2ngy 2y ago
+1 for 'A Philosophy of Software Design.' I read that book a while ago and really liked his views on a lot of things. Off the top of my head some of them are: complexity being the greatest enemy of software engineers, the importance of strategic programming (as opposed to tacit 'somehow-get-the-job-done' programming), general-purpose abstractions, and having deep modules exposed through simple interfaces.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  +1 One of the only books on design which actually is backed up by data. I had been misled by the Ruby ecosystem earlier in my career to do clean code + refactoring + tdd and this book + actually looking at complex systems such as games made me realize that coding is not about abstractions but it is about data and what the computer needs to do.
  - jasinjames 2y ago
    In your view, what word(s) would you use to describe the following? "a carefully designed API for interacting with piece of data which provides both a consistent technical interface and conceptual understanding of the meaning of said thing" The reason I ask is because the word I've always used for that is "abstraction", but I'm getting the sense that over-abstracted and over-architected frameworks has soured many people to the word. I want to communicate the idea without conjuring up images of java classes with 90 character names. What would you recommend?
    - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      You are absolutely right. In that sense the right abstraction is what one should go after. But what I mean is the more popular Java / OOP style abstractions like a repository which returns a builder which returns class which you new up and pass to some sort of super interface and its just such a mess. As a technology I really like the JVM and hotspot but good Lord if I have to wade through 10 different things to get there. Finally to answer your question I have started using the actual name of the thing in the language I'm using. Such as a "struct" in c and rust which I mostly use these days.
random_coder 2y ago
Also, a co-author of the Raft consensus algorithm.

hangonhn 2y ago

Wasn’t he also one of the creators of RAFT (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) )

b112 2y ago

Thanks John, I've kicked many a people from IRC using TCL.

deleted 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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surfingdino 2y ago

Tcl "powers" the internet in a non-direct way since it is used in Cisco IOS.

rwmj 2y ago
And every proprietary EDA tool in the world too.
- bch 2y ago
  ...and a10/F5 aFleX/iRules[0][1], and the scripting in Tealeaf[2][3], ... [0] https://www.a10networks.com/blog/aflex-tutorial/ https://www.a10networks.com/blog/aflex-tutorial/ [1] https://community.f5.com/kb/technicalarticles/irules-concepts-tcl-the-how-and-why/275910 https://community.f5.com/kb/technicalarticles/irules-concept... [2] https://www.acoustic.com/tealeaf https://www.acoustic.com/tealeaf [3] https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043785173-Example-TLSessioning-configuration https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043785173-E...
- IshKebab 2y ago
  ...unfortunately. I guess to be fair if it hadn't been TCL they would have chosen something even worse.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    I guess Lua wasn't available at the time.
latenightcoding 2y ago
Chez Scheme too then!

zakirullin 2y ago

He is an absolutely amazing and extremely humble person. He agreed to review my article (written under the influence of his book) in his spare time. He does tons of code reviews every week for his students as well. I was especially impressed by his notion of "deep modules" in "A Philosophy of Software Design". The idea is extremely not-popular, but really sound and practical. I would definitely go for this book instead of "Clean Code" and such. His book is so fundamental, and it goes far beyond the overused and vague "complexity" term.

skrebbel 2y ago
Any tldr for “deep modules”?
- zakirullin 2y ago
  Deep module - simple interface, complex functionality Shallow module - interface is relatively complex to the small functionality it provides. Shallow modules don't hide as much complexity. https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load?#too-many-small-methods-classes-or-modules https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load?#too-many-small... But I highly recommend picking up the book :) It is an enjoyable read.
  - Scarblac 2y ago
    IIRC, the deep/shallow thing is anout how much functionality there is, and he used wide/narrow for the size of the API? So that the goal is to have deep, narrow modules: modules that have a lot of functionality hidden behibd a small API.
    - v9v 2y ago
      I think a good example of this concept is the foreach command in Tcl: It's quite flexible compared to list iteration constructs found in most languages. This is normal usage: foreach x {1 2} {puts $x} => 1 2 You can iterate over two lists at once: foreach x {1 2} y {3 4} {puts $x $y} => 1 3 2 4 Instead of reading one element from the list, you can read multiple: foreach {x1 x2} {1 2 3 4} y {5 6} {puts $x1 $x2 $y} => 1 2 5 3 4 6 If any of the lists happen to run out before the others, instead of complaining it just returns empty elements. Many commands in Tcl give the impression that they can be used in many different ways, so writing a program in Tcl feels like building a structure by creatively assembling a limited set of legos.

throwaway81523 2y ago

I never liked tcl but the implementation was definitely small, which mattered more back then than it does now. Does anyone still care about it? These days what we really need is an easily embeddable Python. Guile is very nice if you want a somewhat fancy Scheme system, but it got out of control if all you wanted was something light and embeddable.

psychoslave 2y ago
I guess Lua remains the chief goto for light embedded scripting environment, doesn't it?
dunham 2y ago
I believe lua is often used in this role these days. I've gotten the impression that it is light and easy to integrate, but I haven't tried it myself.
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  Yes, Lua is quite easy to embed and is popular in game development for that reason. It appears in a few other applications like Redis as well. But, in the big picture, it's a weird language that is not very popular. People want Python and/or Javascript, and JS is awful, so that leaves Python ;).
  - f1shy 2y ago
    I do bot understand the downvotes. Maybe because of wording “weird”. Give me a break, I think it has a point: much more people can do Python as Lua. I do like Lua, but if I just try to use it in my work, I would be paria.
    - throwaway81523 2y ago
      I had figured people didn't like the dig at JS. Unfortunately the WAT video is no longer on youtube. It might be on destroyallsoftware.com.

bch 2y ago

JO is giant in the industry; a longtime working professional with fantastic pedagogical chops. In my opinion, if he's talking, I'm listening.

lizknope 2y ago

I tried learning Motif to write X11 graphical programs in 1994. Another student in the computer lab told me about Tcl / Tk. It was far easier. Then I got a job in the semiconductor design industry in 1997. The next year the leading EDA companies Cadence and Synopsys started using Tcl as the internal scripting language for the tools. So now it is 2024 and our CAD flows are tens of thousands of lines of Tcl code. Every week I still write Tcl code to generate reports or automate something.

nequo 2y ago
What have been the pros and cons of Tcl for you, compared with other scripting languages if you have experience with them?
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Here's a transcript of a keynote I gave to the Toronto Usenix symposium, where I talked about the pros and cons of TCL/Tk, from developing multi-player SimCity with it around 1993. A lot has changed since then, but in 1993 it was so much better than Motif and every other alternative in so many ways. https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/keynote.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/keynote.html >Hello, my name is Don Hopkins, and I ported SimCity to Unix on top of X11 using the TCL/Tk toolkit, and also on top of the NeWS window system using HyperLook. Unfortunately I can't be in Toronto to demonstrate this stuff to you, but fortunately I have some video tapes that you can see that demonstrate the whole system. >The X11 version of SimCity is multi player, and several people can join the game, and cooperate, and people draw roads, and put down buildings in different places, and then when you do something important, like change the tax rate, or build an airport, you have to get everybody else who's playing to agree where to put it, and which thing to put down. So it makes you slow down and rationalize what you're doing, and explain to people why it is you want to put it there. It's a really interesting addition to SimCity because it adds politics. >I'm going to show first the X11 version, which is on top of TCL/Tk, and that's a free toolkit that's available, written by John Ousterhaut at Berkeley. There's a book that's coming out describing it, and you can just get TCL/Tk and use it to make products for free. You don't have to pay anything for it, and it's actually very good code. It really beats the pants off of Motif, and we were able to modify it in order to support things like colormaps and multiple displays the way we needed to, and add things to it like a sound server to make sound effects, and pie menus for quickly selecting city editing tools. TCL/Tk made alot of sense for SimCity. [...] >HyperLook has this scripting language in it, and TCL/Tk has the TCL scripting language in it, so I was able to translate the things I had written in PostScript into TCL, and have a very similar structure. It makes it much easier to develop a thing as complex as SimCity if you have an interpretive programming language there, so you can just fiddle around, and paste new function definitions into the running system. >There are some user interface editors that have been developed for TCL/Tk, but I just wrote code by hand because I was doing some more specialized things, like multiple views and putting up views on different X11 displays over the net, that the user interface editors didn't support. HyperLook has a built in user interface editor, and I'll demonstrate HyperLook SimCity and the HyperLook environment in the following video tape. [...] >One of the things I developed for TCL/Tk and for HyperLook was this sound mixer server. And then we got an NCD X-Terminal, and just layered my sound mixer on top of their sound server. It can either use the built-in audio device and be a TCL sound server, or it can use the sound server that's in your X-Terminal or your Sun or SGI or whatever, if you're running NetAudio. [...] >For the pie menus and the multi player interaction stuff, like putting up windows on different screens and letting people have a shared view of this one environment, it was really nice to have the source code to the TCL/Tk toolkit, in order to support that kind of stuff. >It wouldn't have been possible to port SimCity to X11 using Open Software Foundation's Motif toolkit. It just absolutely sucks. It's not open, and you have to pay for the source code, and it's not being maintained. >But there's a really wonderful community that's grown around TCL/Tk, and people are allowed to use it in their products for free, and get the source code. I implemented pie menus with TCL/Tk for SimCity, and out of gratitude, I put the source code for the pie menu module out for other people to use, just to help to community. It's a nice positive feedback situation, as opposed to the cold war situation you have with COSE, Motif, and Open Software Foundation. >We bundled the HyperLook runtime system with the NeWS version of SimCity. If you're running OpenWindows 3.0, you can get it and try it out. [...]

spacedcowboy 2y ago

Also responsible for Magic [1],[2] which is the basis (AFAIK) for the efabless route to getting your own chip designed these days... I ported it to the Mac and played with it a while back with the intention of making my own chip, but priorities changed when my wife fell very ill. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(software) [2] http://opencircuitdesign.com/magic/ http://opencircuitdesign.com/magic/

bch 2y ago

TFA mentions the Sprite operating system, which brought us a few things, including (i recently discovered), pmake[0] (by way of Adam de Boor[1]) which was an early instance of parallelizing make(1), and begat BSD Make[2], which is lovely to use. [0] https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/spriteRetrospective.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/spriteRetrospective... [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-de-boor-4293a1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-de-boor-4293a1/ [2] https://man.netbsd.org/make.1 https://man.netbsd.org/make.1

ofalkaed 2y ago

I just recently started learning tcl/tk out of frustration with the other options for gui toolkits. Liking it quite a bit now that I have gotten over the hurdle of figuring out the sense of tcl which often felt like nonsense at the start. TK is especially nice, very easy to work with.

kragen 2y ago
tk is still excellent, tcl is mediocre

monkeydust 2y ago

I remember early in my career working at an investment bank on the trading floor as a support analyst. I was asked by a very frustrated trader to modify the behaviour of one of the trading apps.. basically he shouted..."just figure it out". Yea he was bit of a twat but then trading desks have changed a lot today. The app was from a 3rd party provider and making changes would take time of course, then they told me I could do this myself with Tcl. So in a day I figured out Tcl, made the change and it was in production the next day. Of course doing that now would be impossible but I remember the buzz from being able to make a real world change so damn fast.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

OhMeadhbh 2y ago

Perfect timing. I ordered a copy of "A Philosophy of Software Design" a week ago and it arrived yesterday. I'm going to start reading it tonight, but this is a nice preface, I bet. Several months ago a friend encouraged me to look at Tcl again (independent of Tk.) Mixins, regexes, reflection. All stuff I didn't appreciate in the early 90s. And I had reason to look at Minix a few years back. Ousterhout definitely did some good work. I think he might have been just a little bit ahead of the rest of us.

kragen 2y ago
it didn't have mixins in the early 90s tcl's model of what data is doesn't accommodate general graphs, just trees. you can make a hash table but not a hash table of hash tables. on the plus side you won't have aliasing bugs like python's notorious matrix = [[0] * width] * height because its data model is so weak, you routinely resort to reflection to get things done, which makes it really hard to maintain tcl programs of any depth
leetrout 2y ago
It is a phenomenal book for what it is. It was the required reading for the class I taught at UNC in 2019. I am teaching a workshop in September and bought a copy for every attendee because I believe it is that important for people to be exposed to his ideas and how he approaches things. I was also impressed with "Righting Software" and the premise of volatility based decomposition but it is not nearly as approachable as Ousterhout's book.

EdwardCoffin 2y ago

If you want a more substantial interview with John Ousterhout, I highly recommend his hour-long talk at google A Philosophy of Software Design, which is essentially a synopsis of his book by the same title. Edit: I guess not an interview, but he does answer some questions from the audience at the end. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY

chrisrickard 2y ago

Tcl was the scripting language in the mIRC IRC client, and as a 13 year old, my first foray into programming. I started writing little scripts to boot annoying people off IRC, but ended up caring more about coding than IRC politics - and ended up writing a full blown Napster clone in Tcl. I feel like I owe my career to Tcl opening these doors for me - so thank you John.

waitwhats 2y ago
mIRC has it's own scripting language that doesn't have to do with Tcl. Maybe you are talking about eggdrop IRC bot that uses Tcl as its scripting language - but then your comment and attribution doesn't really make sense.
- mjard 2y ago
  Xircon was a windows IRC client that used TCL for scripting.

kragen 2y ago

a lot of people here are wondering if tcl is something they should check out. tcl has some serious flaws, but some real merits as well. the best and most balanced answer to this question is https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html, which explains some of the reasons i used to really enjoy tcl, before i gave it up for more capable languages maybe the nucleus of kreinin's argument is > So basically, pop infix languages (and I use the term in the most non-judgmental, factual way), pop infix languages are optimized for programming (duh, they are programming languages). Programming is definitions. Define a variable and it will be easy to use it, and computing hairy expressions from variables is also easy. Tcl is optimized for usage. Most of the time, users give simple commands. Command names and literal parameters are easy. If you are a sophisticated user, and you want to do pmem 0 bkpt [expr [pmem 0 pc] + 1], go ahead and do it. A bit ugly, but on the other hand, simple commands are really, really simple. > And eventually, simple commands become all that matters for the user, because the sophisticated user grows personal shortcuts, which abstract away variables and expressions, so you end up with pmem 0 bkpt nextpc or something. Apparently, flat function calls with literal arguments is what interactive program usage is all about. the stallman/ousterhout debate on usenet back in the 90s (from which guile sprang) may be interesting reading, but i think kreinin's post linked above has more deep insights

msephton 2y ago

Tcl has been a staple on Mac for over 30 years at this point, since System 7 at least. It was installed in Mac OS X as standard, not sure if it still is these days. I use it to wrangle text directory listings from old Macintosh CD-ROMs from pre-Unicode era. The character set support and conversion code seems to have been written by Apple themselves in the mid-1990s. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2022/03/31/working-with-classic-macintosh-text-encodings-in-the-age-of-unicode/ https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2022/03/31/working-with-clas... I was pleasantly surprised by the syntax and capability of Tcl as well as the fact that it's still being developed and supported and that the maintainers took my feature requests and bug reports seriously and actioned them in what I consider a short time.

breck 2y ago
> It was installed in Mac OS X as standard, not sure if it still is these days. It is! Just type "tclsh"
- brnt 2y ago
  However, the Tk install that Macos ships with is so broken there's even a warning about it on the Tcl website (or was it the Python website, in case you try to use Tkinter on system Python). Invisible text, invisible buttons, Apple's got you covered....
- msephton 2y ago
  Interesting, I am using a self-installed version for ...reasons.
  - breck 2y ago
    Would love to read more. Also: > This site is powered by Jekyll (but, I absolutely definitely do not recommend it) Can I recommend Scroll to you (https://scroll.pub/ https://scroll.pub/). It's not good yet, but should be great in 3 - 6 months. P.S. Loving your blog
    - 2y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

I want something like a "RAMcloud" for home use. A computer with more RAM than secondary storage that boots from USB and no pre-installed corporate OS.

dang 2y ago

Related: A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34733120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34733120 - Feb 2023 (92 comments)

hejira 2y ago

I can also very much recommend his book about programming methodology. Lots of good sane advice there for anyone wanting to learn more about structuring code and keeping everything readable and bug free.