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Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

I dunno why you got down voted, your point seems valid to me. Tcl thrived under John, after him it was ok when Hobbs was the de facto leader, it's sort of gone flat since he moved on. In my opinion.

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Thank you for saying so. It's probably because my comment was so terse and comes off as flippant. But I assure you it was not meant to be. I think it very much matters that TCL doesn't have a BDFL. I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I'd forgotten that Ousterhout was initial head honcho. I got to know Tcl via Expect and Tk, like many others I'm sure. Kind of like how many encounter Ruby through Rails and Perl through having committed some awful deed in a previous life. Tk and Expect were always pretty niche though.

Well cool, I upvoted your stuff. I agree that the BDFL is extremely valuable. Tcl is doing ok but it's not the same as when there was someone with a lot of vision setting a clear direction. The core team that is left believes in everything is a string too much for my taste, I think Ousterhout would have fixed more stuff by now.

It's "gone flat" because there are a lot of languages out there to choose from. Despite not having a BDFL, the TCT has steadily improved the language and added features. It's popularity is where it is and that probably isn't going to change. It's hard to be top dog now days.

Perhaps because lots of languages have done well without a BDFL. Look at the top 10 languages in Tiobe or the RedMonk surveys, and the majority don't have BDFLs.

Ok, let's do that:

    1	1		Java	12.961%	-6.05%
    2	2		C	6.477%	-4.83%
    3	3		C++	5.550%	-0.25%
    4	4		C#	4.195%	-0.71%
    5	5		Python	3.692%	-0.71%
    6	8	change	Visual Basic .NET	2.569%	+0.05%
    7	6	change	PHP	2.293%	-0.88%
    8	7	change	JavaScript	2.098%	-0.61%
    9	9		Perl	1.995%	-0.52%
   10	12	change	Ruby

Of TCL's brethren

Python, BDFL

PHP, BDFL

Perl, BDFL

Ruby, BDFL

The rest (even though you wouldn't compare them to TCL cuz they're not in the same niche) have/had huge corporate sponsors and/or are entrenched industry standards and have also had iconic/notable figureheads (Gosling, K&R, Stroustrup, Hejlsberg, Eich).

Perl probably shouldn't be in that list. It's arguable that Larry has had any direct influence on it for at least ten years, perhaps 15.

All of them had at least one company pushing them into the outside world.

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