

Happy 15th Birthday to Tcl and the Tk Toolkit - pmarin
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1335649

======
davidw
Cool! That's me on the cover:
[http://www.informit.com/store/LargeCover.aspx?isbn=032160175...](http://www.informit.com/store/LargeCover.aspx?isbn=0321601750)
:-)

(BTW, they're talking about the book by J.O, Tcl is older than 15 years,
probably closer to 20).

~~~
johnm
Woohoo! It's great to see an update to John's book!

[BTW, the Tcl language is well over 20 years old. IIRC, Tk is about 20 years
old.]

------
psranga
Tcl is an amazing language. Very underrated. It's "EIAS" (everything is a
string) philosophy, and the duality of strings and lists is very very
powerful. It's got one of the best-documented and precisely written standard
libraries I've ever seen (and the "extended standard library" tcllib is of
similar quality).

E.g., if some script returns "350 seconds to execute command <more stuff
here>" you can hold your nose and just treat the string as a list and extract
the 0th element :) ('lindex $return 0').

It's speed leaves much to be desired. My ideal stack would in a large project
would be:

1\. Tcl shell on top 2\. ... talking to either Python or C/C++ below

~~~
davidw
Python is, I think, still a bit faster than Tcl, but it's not the order of
magnitude that C is. And, realistically, there are a lot of things that Tcl
_is_ fast enough for these days... it's certainly in the same league as, if
not faster, than Ruby and PHP.

------
adoyle
Tcl gave me my first taste of scripting, but even more of a revelation was
that I could bury a Tcl interpreter in a C program and use Tcl to control all
the C modules. It made it really easy to dynamically change the behavior of a
running server. Of course security was a bit of an issue, but in 1992 the net
was still relatively calm.

~~~
davidw
Tcl's C API is still more or less the 'best in the business', afaik. Ruby and
Python aren't _bad_ , but Tcl just gives you so much access, and the source
code itself (modulo the regexp code) is a pleasure to read if you want to hack
the C code yourself.

------
pmarin
Nice to see a _new_ Tcl book on the bookshelves

