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Comment by tracnar | Hacker News Reader

The Tcl wiki is quite strange, it has interesting content but most pages are discussions like this one and it's hard to find what's relevant or even correct.

What's weird about the Tcl syntax is that there is barely any. It's very dynamic so only the top-level of a file is parseable as a list of commands, anything else like a procedure depends on the implementation of the command which can be overridden at any time.

It's even used by built-in commands like expr and if which essentially implement a mini expression language which is different from Tcl.

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That's what wikis originally were. Wikipedia's curated ontology is an exception that only looks like the rule because most OG wikis have died off.

Emacswiki is one active one still like that and the effort to replace it with MediaWiki was ultimately abortive. C2 is also big but I think mostly dead.

That is true but doesn't fully explain the OP's "what's relevant or even correct" bit. The truth is that OG wikis needed a special kind of moderators---affectionally called WikiGardener or even WikiMaster---who clean up things and deal with conflicts without removing values provided by prior authors but possibly removing the contents themselves. If this sounds absurd that's because it does; it is waaay harder to maintain than typical forums and even encyclopedic wikis popularized by Wikipedia. And without those kind of hard and thankless moderation non-encyclopedic wikis generally end up with being a dump of uncurated informations.

I have been writing some Tcl for the last couple of years, mostly in place of shell scripts. Going to Tcl wiki is always a surreal experience. I think this old comment captured it perfectly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9098859

Equal time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9102916

It's an accessible Lisp with square brackets.

Not really. References are pretty fundamental to Lisp, but are (at best) bolted on in Tcl.

Really. It's been a couple of decades, but when I used to do a lot of Tcl programming, I too noticed that coding in Tcl had a certain Lispish quality to it.

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