Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

About 20 years or so ago, I was hired at a large online travel site to assist in porting the entire codebase from a mix of TCL and C++ to (then new, popular, exciting) Java. I had a strong background in both C++ and Java at the time but had never even heard of TCL. When I first started looking at some of the code, I could see why it was a natural choice for building websites: the TCL syntax seemed to just flowed naturally into HTML. When I, as the “new Java guy” inevitably got blamed for the shortcomings of Java against the old TCL codebase, I was hard-pressed to defend JSP against it. I never really worked with TCL much, but even 10 years later, long after the migration was complete, the old hands still missed it.

View on HN

It was a perfect language for the web in a lot of ways. With some other guys, I made an Apache module that let you do PHP type scripts, back in the day: https://tcl.apache.org/rivet/

For a while, I know that https://flightaware.com/ used it fairly heavily. Indeed, their careers page still shows an interest in Tcl skills.

Famously Ars Digita, founded by Philip Greenspun, started out using AOLserver and Tcl to design websites. The company wrote what I suppose would now be called a "middleware stack".

After he sold the company to Red Hat I worked there really briefly. Apparently half the sales fell through because Tcl wasn't regarded as "enterprisey" enough for customers (note the customers themselves would probably never write a line of code). There was an attempt to rewrite the entire engine in Java — it being 2002 — which limped along for a while before the project died.

But there's more! The original Tcl stack was open sourced and continues to this day as OpenACS (https://openacs.org/).

The Java rewrite also still exists (https://svnlegacy.ow2.org/byline/) but has been dead 15+ years, and just digging into those 7 level deep directories rekindles a feeling of dread in me.

I learned web development using openacs around 2005. I got alot of value out of the experience.

ad_proc and online documentation was awesome.

I also had to figure many things out from first principles because documentation was all for PHP and Apache, not aolserver and tcl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com