HPR2386: The Decline and Fall of Tcl

Tcl is an interesting language that does many things "wrong", especially if you're coming from a LISP perspective, and especially-especially if you're coming from a Scheme perspective. Examples are all over the C2 wiki, but probably DynamicStringsVsFunctional is the epicenter.

It also forms an important part of modern Scheme history, as the Tcl War led to the creation of Guile.

What happened after that? Where Tcl and Tk went wrong, by David N Welton

TL;DL: Tcl was successful because it found its niche as a lightweight yet capable language able to both integrate and be integrated with C code, but it fell behind on Tk look-and-feel compared to GNOME and KDE and also on other mainstream development phenomena, it ossified because it was afraid to upset its installed base, it got stuck between not-slim-enough and not-featureful-enough, the syntax is too weird, and it spiraled into losing touch with the rest of the free software world, which ultimately also affected business use.

Further notes

• Guile (again) faces several of these same challenges.
• Haskell tries to avoid success at all costs, in order to not lose the freedom to improve the language.
• Python and Perl both have Tk integrations and Python's IDLE is even implemented in it. Lua had ltk, but it's no longer maintained. There is even a Tcl/Tk package for R.
• Ousterhout pronounces it OH-stir-howt, which may or may not be how I pronounced it. I think the guttural sound may be reserved for the Dutch "G" and have nothing to do with "H".

Potential episodes

• Fossil
• Tcl

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