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The rise and decline of !tcltk : an analysis.
It's a good read and written in quite a narrative form, so I think I'm going to read it out loud as an #hprep.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong/
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@perloid I have used tcl a bit when playing with expect and sqlite, but I think I learned it when messing with the SunOS package system back in uni.
It's an oldie but goldie and I'd like to do more with it at some point, not the least to look into [incr tcl].
I find it fascinating how Tcl manages to do several things opposite from common wisdom (dynamic scope, references by name only, are the two main ones) yet somehow ends up with equivalent power to more abstract languages like Scheme. #picolisp is rather tcl-like in that aspect and intrigues me too.
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@perloid Tcl with tclsh is the only language I know that stays very close to processes and system commands, yet still can express complex nested variable situations and calls without giving you quoting-derived aneurysms and make you fear you left a whitespace bug somewhere.
I probably should jump out of bash and into tcl as soon as a program goes beyond a few lines ...
@lnxw48a1
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@perloid @lnxw48a1 Having to use #expect signals to me that somebody made some big mistakes designing their software.
But when you're there and it's an established fact that you have to work with what you've got, Expect is invaluable.
And it simply isn't possible to express yourself as neatly in pexpect (Python) as it is in the original.
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@perloid Never heard of MH before, looks like I've discovered a whole subculture!
Sadly, looks like its web presence is quite fractured and incomplete these days. The wiki is dead, for one.
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@perloid Yes, looks like a maildir ancestor. Very cool.
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> I find it fascinating how Tcl manages to do several things opposite from common wisdom (dynamic scope, references by name only, are the two main ones) yet somehow ends up with equivalent power to more abstract languages like Scheme.
And indeed someone even implemented !scheme in it too:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/25512
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@perloid The world's first book published on the internet!
Whatever that means. I'm guessing they worked on it in public and took comments?
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A response to the article brings up a concrete example of the technical and social challenges using !tcltk :
http://robertvbinder.com/what-i-learned-building-a-software-product-with-tcl/
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/via https://lobste.rs/s/79hpcl/where_tcl_tk_went_wrong
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Posted. http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2386
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Of course only minutes later I find the page I was hoping would exist:
http://www.tkdocs.com/resources/languages.html
It's not very exhaustive, but I did forget to mention Ruby/Tk. Does anyone know a longer list of languages with Tk packages? I don't believe for a minute only Python, Perl, Lua, Ruby and R did it.
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To further entangle their histories, there was of course a Guile Tk, now abandoned for Guile Gnome.
https://wiki.tcl.tk/4546