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I've worked pretty heavily in both. I don't think Tcl is clearly superior, as a language, to Perl. And, certainly the CPAN is vastly more impressive and vital t

I've worked pretty heavily in both. I don't think Tcl is clearly superior, as a language, to Perl. And, certainly the CPAN is vastly more impressive and vital than the ecosystem around Tcl. One of the reasons I gave up on Tcl was because there just weren't enough people working in it to keep the libraries moving forward (and our website, built on OpenACS, was suffering for it). So, since we're talking about CPAN, I'd say that the library and development ecosystem around Tcl is "unsolid" where for Perl it is pretty impressive. It's only relatively recently that Python and Ruby have reached parity with CPAN, even.

davidw 12y ago
> Perl might never had much luster and got slightly outpaced by other scripting languages within the last few years, but it's got a very solid foundation, unlike e.g. Tcl. Was the phrase, though. I don't think anyone really questions whether CPAN is better than what Tcl had, and you can debate what you like about both languages, but to call Tcl unsolid is not very accurate, in my opinion.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I assumed what he meant by "the foundation" was the libraries and culture, which Perl demonstrably has gotten pretty right, while Tcl hasn't. If the foundation is everything you build your projects on top of, then Perl has a vastly better foundation. If the foundation is just the language itself, then Tcl is pretty good. So, I see where you're coming from if speaking only of the language itself. Tcl is a quite nice, well-thought-out, language. It has a few quirks, but so does Perl.
  - mhd 12y ago
    Yes, that's what I intended to say. Maybe "foundations" would've been clearer. The first two of which would probably be the language design itself and the implementation. I'd rather not argue about the former, and regarding the latter I don't have a lot of experience with Perl, although I've heard that it's gotten better once they awoke out of the post-Perl6 slump. Still, Tcl was always pretty great in that regard. But as we're talking about the CPAN here, a lot of the alternatives come out short-handed, and Tcl amongst them. I remember the days when you had a different interpreter for every extension...

davidw 12y ago

> Perl might never had much luster and got slightly outpaced by other scripting languages within the last few years, but it's got a very solid foundation, unlike e.g. Tcl. Was the phrase, though. I don't think anyone really questions whether CPAN is better than what Tcl had, and you can debate what you like about both languages, but to call Tcl unsolid is not very accurate, in my opinion.

SwellJoe 12y ago
I assumed what he meant by "the foundation" was the libraries and culture, which Perl demonstrably has gotten pretty right, while Tcl hasn't. If the foundation is everything you build your projects on top of, then Perl has a vastly better foundation. If the foundation is just the language itself, then Tcl is pretty good. So, I see where you're coming from if speaking only of the language itself. Tcl is a quite nice, well-thought-out, language. It has a few quirks, but so does Perl.
- mhd 12y ago
  Yes, that's what I intended to say. Maybe "foundations" would've been clearer. The first two of which would probably be the language design itself and the implementation. I'd rather not argue about the former, and regarding the latter I don't have a lot of experience with Perl, although I've heard that it's gotten better once they awoke out of the post-Perl6 slump. Still, Tcl was always pretty great in that regard. But as we're talking about the CPAN here, a lot of the alternatives come out short-handed, and Tcl amongst them. I remember the days when you had a different interpreter for every extension...