Extending Tcl

That was Stallman's response to Sun bombastically pushing TCL as the official scripting language of the web, BEFORE Live Oak / Java was a widely known (or evangelized) thing.

At the point anybody started talking about a Java/TCL bridge, it was already all over for TCL becoming the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet".

Sun's unilateral anointment of TCL as the official Internet scripting language trigged RMS's "Why you should not use Tcl" message, which triggered the TCL War, which triggered Sun to switch to Java.

After the TCL war finally subsided, Sun quietly pushed TCL aside and loudly evangelize Java instead. The TCL community was quite flustered and disappointed after first winning the title "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet" and then having the title yanked away and given to Java.

Any talk of bridges were just table scraps for TCL, the redheaded bastard stepchild sitting outside on the back porch in the rain, smoking a cigarette and commiserating with NeWS and Self.

Tom Lord's description of what happened is insightful and accurate:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft...

>The Infamous Tcl War

>[...] Mr. Ousterhout had, a few years prior, developed Tcl while on the faculty of UC Berkeley - mainly, I think, to have a handy tool for other research and only secondarily as an experiment in language design. And he topped it off with Tk. Tcl/Tk took off in a huge way. It was easy to understand. The source code, written in Mr. Ousterhout's methodical and lucid style, was a joy to read. At the time, about the most convenient option for developing a GUI to run on a unix system was to write C code against the Motif toolkit - an ugly, expensive, and frequently disappointing process. With Tcl/Tk in hand, people started handing out new "mini-GUIs" for this and that, like candy. Tcl/Tk started to find application in some rather intense areas, like, for example, the "control station" software for some oil rigs. It was a smash hit.

>Meanwhile, I don't think I'm letting too many cats out of the bag here, the informal Silicon Valley social network of well placed hackers were quietly and unofficially circulating some very interesting confidential whitepapers from Sun Microsystems. One of their researchers, a fellow called Mr. Gosling, had dusted off a language he'd once led the design of called "Oak". Oak was originally intended for use in embedded systems. Its basic premise was that devices ought to be Turing complete and hackable, whenever possible. Oak's approach to statically verifiable byte-code comes from that origin. Mr. Gosling came out of Carnegie Mellon University and the attiude behind Oak was popular there. As one grad student had quipped a few years earlier: "If a light switch isn't Turing Complete I don't even want to touch it."

>In light of the rising star of web browsers, the folks at Sun conceived the notion of offering up a derivative of Oak to serve as the extension language for browsers. (It is probably worth mentioning here that Mr. Gosling was earlier well known for making one of the very first unix versions of Emacs.) Oak was re-named "Java" and the rest of its history is fairly well known.

>I've read, since then, that up to around that point Brendan Eich had been working on a Scheme-based extension language for Netscape Navigator. Such was the power of the hegemony of the high level folks at Sun that the word came down on Mr. Eich: "Get it done. And make it look like Java." Staying true to his sense of Self, he quickly knocked out the first implementation of Mocha, later renamed Javascript. This phenomenon of Sun's hegemony influencing other firms turns out to be a small pattern, as you'll see.

>Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision:

>Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars.

>Mr. Eich, bless his soul, brute-forced passed them, abandoning Scheme and inventing Javascript. [...]

Like NeWS was the Network extensible Window System, so NeFS was the Network extensible File System, or NFS 3.0.

It was actually a great idea, just a wee bit before its time, and very poorly named and positioned!

For example: If you want to make a copy of a file on the server, you can send a PostScript program that runs in the kernel and copies the file locally on the server in the kernel with ZERO context switches, instead of sending it over the net to the client, then back from the client to the server. Even if you rsh'ed the user command "cp" on the server, it would still incur context switching, but if your copy loop was running in the kernel then it didn't need to switch in and out and in and out for every block it copied.

There are more examples of why it's a great idea in the paper.

This comparison of NeWS to AJAX also applies NeFS, which is like kernel NeWS with file operations instead of a graphics library -- it also saves you lots of user/kernel context switches even if you're not doing any networking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:

>- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

>- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

>- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.

It didn't go over very well because the unenlightened philistines of the time couldn't get their head around an API to the file system that wasn't compatible with creat open close read write and ioctl.

http://donhopkins.com/home/nfs3_0.pdf

Network Extensible File System Protocol Specification

1.0 Introduction

The Network Extensible File System protocol (NeFS) provides transparent remote access to shared file systems over networks. The NeFS protocol is designed to be machine, operating system, network architecture, and transport protocol independent. This document is the draft specification for the protocol. It will remain in draft form during a period of public review. Italicized comments in the document are intended to present the rationale behind elements of the design and to raise questions where there are doubts. Comments and suggestions on this draft specification are most welcome.

[...]

Example: Copy a File

Make a copy of file (foo) called (bar). Both files exist in the same directory dfh. The request starts by looking up the filehandle for the file to be copied and creates a filehandle for the copy. The loop operator executes a procedure that copies the file using 1K reads and writes. It maintains a running count of the number of bytes yet to be copied.

    % Copy a file
    %
    dfh (foo) lookup /foofh exch def % get filehandle for (foo)
    dfh (bar) create /barfh exch def % create filehandle for (bar)
    /bytes foofh getattr /fsize get def % get size of (foo) so we know how much to copy
    /offset 0 def % initialize offset for (bar)
    {
        /data foofh offset 1024 read def % read up to 1K from (foo)
        barfh offset data write % write up to 1K to (bar)
        /bytes bytes 1024 sub def % decrement byte count by 1024
        bytes 0 le { exit } if % if it’s < 0 then we’re done
        /offset offset 1024 add def % increment offset by 1024
    }
    loop
    barfh getattr 1 encodereply sendreply % return the attributes of the new file to client.

I had really high hopes for Lua. But 1-based indexing when you're interfacing to C is just not flying. Apparently I'm not alone as Lua comes in at #9 on the "Dreaded" languages list:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-mo...

Early Tcl was slow - but it was being compared to pure C. Recent Tcl is as snappy as any HLL.