
Bounty program for improvements to Tcl and certain Tcl packages - pmarin
https://github.com/flightaware/Tcl-bounties
======
brudgers
A person could work on one of these, develop a top technical solution, and
still not have their code accepted based on the organizational features and
interpersonal relationships of the TCL community. And without a contract,
there's no recourse if a person undertakes one of these projects and meets the
requirements does not get paid.

Just hire a programmer to do the work and pay them in accord with a contract.

~~~
dkfellows
Yes, that's at least technically possible. On the other hand, there's enough
work that I believe it very unlikely that anything would be rejected like that
provided it works well with the rest of the language, and is reasonably
documented and tested. I also know the people involved; we're more of the
"You're doing the work? Let us hold your coat for you." persuasion.

The bounties are not large enough to pay someone to solve them. The ones that
are fairly low value are likely to get picked off rapidly by the existing
community by just focusing their attention slightly differently. The high
value ones are in the class where you'd need a team of expert programmers to
take them on, and would expect to be supporting them for an extended period of
time; that can burn through $100k in pretty short order. (Yes, I'm working on
that particular bounty, but I was doing so before the bounty was announced. I
know how _exactly_ difficult it is.)

IOW, these are all rewards for success, not pay for doing.

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pawadu
My immediate reactions to this was (A) that's a lot of money and (B) why are
people still using TCL for embedded-scripting now that we have Lua?

~~~
pmarin
why are people still using Lua for embedded-scripting now that we have
Javascript? we can play this game all day.

Tcl was one the the popular scripting languages when Flightaware started using
it.

~~~
pawadu
Point taken :)

But remember that Lua was specifically designed for embedded scripting and has
minimal footprint. A javascript engine is a huge beast in comparison.

~~~
mayoff
But remember that Tcl was specifically designed for embedded scripting:

> In the fall of 1987, while on sabbatical at DEC's Western Research
> Laboratory, I got the idea of building an embeddable command language. The
> idea was to spend extra effort to create a good interpreted language, and
> furthermore to build it as a library package that could be reused in many
> different applications.

[http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-
bin/tclHistory.php](http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php)

------
davidw
I can vouch for Karl Lehenbauer - he's one of the head dudes at
flightaware.com and they definitely use a bunch of Tcl.

