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I'm new to Tcl myself, though I've seen it mentioned here and there for many years. It seems that, like Perl, the language and its ecosystem have continued to e

I'm new to Tcl myself, though I've seen it mentioned here and there for many years. It seems that, like Perl, the language and its ecosystem have continued to evolve while many folks' impressions of it are linked to an earlier stage of development. To be more precise, consider the face of Perl that's presented by the Modern Perl book[1]. It's quite elegant, really, and that "way of Perl" has been around for more than several years, but many negative impressions of the language come from the "line noise" days of earlier perls, both by way of lore and legacy code that is still in production. Tcl 8.6.3, the current release, has a wealth of great features[2] including tail calls, coroutines, lambda functions, and a robust core object system. I imagine that relatively few former Tcl pogrammers, who moved on to other technologies over the last decade, are aware of those developments. [1] http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ [2] http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html

Zuider 12y ago
Whoa! Adtivestate's license for the community edition is quite restrictive: Dev and test machines (non-production) only http://www.activestate.com/languages/compare-editions http://www.activestate.com/languages/compare-editions I am glad to see that there are other binary distributions available for a wide variety of OSs, including Android: http://wiki.tcl.tk/668 http://wiki.tcl.tk/668
- michaelsbradley 12y ago
  The source distributions don't have any such restrictions, as far as I'm aware, being wholly covered by a BSD-like license. The "community", "business" and "enterprise" distinctions, and their respective costs/restrictions, refer solely to ActiveState's particular distributions.
- hga 12y ago
  If I remember correctly, ActiveState has been in business for two decades, their news goes back to 1998, and I remember using their Perl for Windows in 1998, so they seem to be doing something right. What I remember from back in the '90s was that you paid them for polish, support and running well on alien systems like Windows. When I first used them, it was in a "Windows Shop" (well, I was the 2nd programmer :-), and their Perl was a trivial to get running version which then allowed me to show what such a language could do for the right tasks, e.g. an IIS backend page in it instead of Javascript or VB, or quickly importing a database of Nielson advertising categories for a contract with them.
  - Zuider 12y ago
    I have the greatest respect and regard for ActiveState, and I am grateful for their community editions. I believe that they were pioneers in this at a time when one either had to spend a lot of money, or go through the headache of compiling your own distribution if you wanted to use a half-way decent language on Windows, even just to learn. It makes good sense to buy a license if one is going to use one of their products commercially because the value that they add is well worth the price. I just hadn't realized that I would be contravening the license agreement if I had used one of their community editions to make money.

Zuider 12y ago

Whoa! Adtivestate's license for the community edition is quite restrictive: Dev and test machines (non-production) only http://www.activestate.com/languages/compare-editions http://www.activestate.com/languages/compare-editions I am glad to see that there are other binary distributions available for a wide variety of OSs, including Android: http://wiki.tcl.tk/668 http://wiki.tcl.tk/668

michaelsbradley 12y ago
The source distributions don't have any such restrictions, as far as I'm aware, being wholly covered by a BSD-like license. The "community", "business" and "enterprise" distinctions, and their respective costs/restrictions, refer solely to ActiveState's particular distributions.
hga 12y ago
If I remember correctly, ActiveState has been in business for two decades, their news goes back to 1998, and I remember using their Perl for Windows in 1998, so they seem to be doing something right. What I remember from back in the '90s was that you paid them for polish, support and running well on alien systems like Windows. When I first used them, it was in a "Windows Shop" (well, I was the 2nd programmer :-), and their Perl was a trivial to get running version which then allowed me to show what such a language could do for the right tasks, e.g. an IIS backend page in it instead of Javascript or VB, or quickly importing a database of Nielson advertising categories for a contract with them.
- Zuider 12y ago
  I have the greatest respect and regard for ActiveState, and I am grateful for their community editions. I believe that they were pioneers in this at a time when one either had to spend a lot of money, or go through the headache of compiling your own distribution if you wanted to use a half-way decent language on Windows, even just to learn. It makes good sense to buy a license if one is going to use one of their products commercially because the value that they add is well worth the price. I just hadn't realized that I would be contravening the license agreement if I had used one of their community editions to make money.