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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

I like Tcl a lot. The design is simple, extremely easy to learn, and yet the code is still maintainable (((looking at you LISP))). Among the scripting languages I've used, I probably liked Tcl the most. I wish it didn't fall out of favor.

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Same here! Tcl/tk is a lovely little language and much under appreciated by many! Interesting software started in tcl, such as redis, expect and sqlite. Still use some tcl through environment-modules, in my personal work setup.

Have to say that lisps are very nice too, in my opinion. Started learning a little common lisp recently and was surprised by its elegance. I think lisps can be very maintainable, when care is taken. It's easy to write unreadable programs, but this also holds for tcl. With great power comes great responsibility.

I think a lot of programmers as they are first learning their first language go through a phase of trying to count brackets and parentheses and failing miserably (those bugs are horrible to hunt down) before finding editors that help match them for you. Even then, many editors don't do a great job of this so coders develop a certain aversion to using many parentheses or brackets of any type. This is also rooted in the conventional C philosophies that more than two levels of indentation are a bad thing.

At least that was how I used to see things, prior to getting familiar with Lisp and emacs. Now I find myself using all kinds of parentheses in every language so as to make order-of-operations more explicit at a quick glance. I even learned to count parentheses and almost enjoy it.

I think learning Python's complete-opposite approach of getting rid of brackets in most cases and using indentation-only also clarified my thinking on the matter. I find that this brings back the old problem of mismatched-bracket bug hunting, but worse because indentation levels can get shifted and then there's no amount of paren-matching that will help sort things out.

In essence, I think everyone should learn Python and Lisp, then see which philosophy they like better.

In my very humble opinion, the parens in lisps are one of the most redeeming qualities as it makes IDE manipulation so much easier and macros are much easier to write. I did enjoy Ruby a lot too though, and you can definitely see some of the clean-syntax similarities.

I was a big Tcl user between 1999 and 2002, our startup was an heavy user, however the experience of slowly replacing Tcl with C code, made me never choose languages without either JIT or AOT compiler ever again, other than for scripting tasks.

There was a commercially available Tcl compiler available at that time. Did you ever take a look at it?

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GE+ICE+Tcl+compiler

That was a long time ago, and computers have come a long way.

Maybe now is a good time to re-examine those assumptions and re-evaluate those priorities.

At a time when Electron is the cross platform UI toolkit of choice, Tcl/Tk seriously deserves a second look.

I've been evaluating different languages for writing plugins and TCL really seems tempting. Unfortunately, I've been leaning towards Lua just due to its pervasiveness (today). I also vaguely remember one of the top contenders having some more esoteric parts that concerned me. I can't remember how much of that was TCL, Lua, or both.

Both are good with that kind of usage. It will really end up being your preference.

Indeed as sibling comment mentions there are Tcl fans out there. The guy who created redis has good things to say[0]. With a little evangelism it could maybe stage a comeback.

[0]http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html

Dr. Hipp of SQLite fame likes Tcl. The ginormous test suite is in Tcl.

In addition, the entire Fossil front-end (the SCM used for hosting SQLite) is also written in Tcl, which makes it incredibly easy to edit and extend.

Fellow tcl lover here. When I left my tcl job I felt like I was approaching some next level of productivity that I've never quite found with other languages

Is this a classic story, perhaps on the tcl wiki:

On site with a customer, the question of creating a GUI interface came up. A few engineers left and, after a bit of time in another room, came back with a proposal already demo'd in tcl/tk.

I adore Tcl, and always have. Funny that you mention Lisp, because I've always considered Tcl a kind of "close cousin" of Lisp; both in it's code structure and the ability to build new control structures and the like. It feels more Lisp-y to me than it does C-y.

You're absolutely right. But I have bad memories of dealing with parentheses in AutoLISP from the 90's. The trauma remains :)

My only lisp experience was trying to teach myself AutoLISP in notepad in the mid 90s - I remember the parentheses trauma well. This was before I knew any CS or what a functional language was.

I did come away impressed though with how it could map to CAD concepts. It reminded me of the RPN stack when programming my HP42 calculator. I could sense there was an underlying elegance I wasn't fully grasping.

I've used Tcl extensively over many years. It's a tremendously flexible tool that can be shaped to accomplish many tasks. Tcl was never the most widely used scripting language but it's alive and well, and its development continues with new versions on the horizon. There still is a lot to like about Tcl.

Off-topic, but you should be aware that the (((triple parentheses))) are apparently an anti-semitic thing. Just so you know it can be misinterpreted in some contexts x)

When idiots started using the "echo" tags in tech oriented forums, people would jokingly ask where all these damn lisp programmers were coming from.

I've never heard of this perhaps because HN is about the only social media I use. However, there is an ADL page on this. See https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/echo

Context is everything. I am pretty sure LISP is not Jewish so (((looking at your LISP))) is perfectly fine.

John McCarthy's mom was Jewish.

When anti-semites or alt-right people or other hate groups decide to adopt an arbitrary, commonly used sign (like, the "ok" symbol [1]), is the correct reaction to stop using that sign, basically giving it to them, or is the correct reaction to use it as much as possible in non-racist/x-ist contexts, to dilute the intended co-option? Honestly I don't really know the answer. I completely understand avoiding it to not have your comment or action taken out of context, as the risk of personal damage is high, but on the other hand I don't feel that society should just "give away" common symbology just because some hate group decides to take it. How can this be fought?

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/26/us/adl-new-hate-symbols/i...

I am curious as to what most westerners react when they see a Hindu swastika? Is it common knowledge that there's a Hindu/Buddhist swastika or is it percieved as Nazi swastika?

It was a Native American symbol also. It was on the insignia of the 45th Division, a National Guard unit from the American southwest; but as WW II approached, it was swapped for a thunderbird.

Kipling used a Hindu swastika on his books. He also, I believe, discontinued this with the rise of the Nazis. Don't those arms point counter-clockwise, though?

Buddhist swastika is counterclockwise. Hindu Swastika is clockwise. None of them are tilted like Nazi swastika, though.

Ah. Then it was the Buddhist swastika Kipling used.

Huh, I had no idea. HN won't let me edit it either. Thanks for letting me know.

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