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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

There are two versions, one with SQLite built in. The choice of TCL is super interesting given its pedigree and could easily bring TCL back from its quiescent state.

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I worked for the company that powered most of the world's (legitimate) online gambling companies.

We had a C application server and used TCL as a business logic language. It was a great fit for writing code fast and ease of maintenance.

You can hear me get a laugh when I say we use TCL in a talk I did here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY

Curious to know if this C application server is an open project or home crafted closed code?

If the company in question is Openbet, it's closed source.

I wish it were opened up. It was a thing of beauty.

Seems unlikely, IMO. I tried Tcl/Tk and wanted to like it, but it's all over the place. Half the docs you find are outdated, and figuring out how certain pieces connect together is a bit like walking through a maze.

Worse yet, a lot of the tools aren't open source or freely available, even for tinkering. I'll happily pay for a license if I end up using it for business, but I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars up front just to play around with a niche language.

There's lots of great languages out there which include completely free and open source tools. Maybe I'm spoiled.

What you’re saying it quite the opposite to what it actually is. All docs are in one place (well, two places both hosted at tcl.tk), one of them is the actual docs (also installed as manpages on your system), and the other one is the wiki, a huge source of useful information written by both developers and other users.

I can't think of how Tcl/Tk docs can be massively outdated given that Tcl/Tk maintains almost 100% backwards compatibility, so most of the old advice works just as is.

Regarding open source, nearly all tools are not only open source, but usually under very permissive licenses (e.g. Expat or BSD-2), and there are in fact very few commercial closed-source tools (basically Komodo, what else?).

Are you sure you actually tried Tcl/Tk and not something else?

This (or anything else) isn't going to bring back a resurgence in Tcl use. A simple web app framework like this is something many languages have, and I think in this case it's best seen not so much about the web framework being the centrepiece. Instead, for the existing (and generally aging) body of people who have a good sized chunk of their work in Tcl, this becomes another utility to build an interface to that other code.

As an aside, Tcl was influential as a source of inspiration in the early days, ranging from event-driven programming, to web servers big (AOLserver) and small (Brent Welch and Stephen Uhler's <200 line server/HTML parser) back when "normal" was forked CGI scripts.

It's likely tcl because the origins of sqlite we're an extension of tcl.

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