Tcled: Pure Tcl Console Text Editor (2019)

Given that my first job was being part of a portuguese startup that created an AOLServer clone for our middleware, yep.

His "A Philosophy of Software Design" book is one of my favorite software books of the last few years.

It is worth learning considering a few things. The ruleset is freakishly simple and the docs are good. The speed at which you can prototype a gui is somewhat unparalleled. The ability to glue or automate different bits of software is often better than bash. It is called the tool command language after all, though they'll never get me to stop saying tickle.

The best time was “back when it made sense”. The second best time is now.

Fantastically capable language.

As others already said, it's still a nice language to learn for several reasons. For one, doing even very minor stuff in the Lua-Tcl-Scheme triad gets you a good overview of the trade-offs of scripting languages, the importance of syntax etc.

But in a more practical sense, I see Tcl/Tk closer to awk these times. You won't deliver products in it, but it can come in very helpful in your own tooling or ad-hoc scripting. There's a surprising amount of uses for GUIs that are basically just a few buttons.

One very fruitful use I can remember is a factory setup, where people controlled parts of the machinery via Windows remote login. Now, if someone was already doing this and another person logged in, you basically stole their session.

So in came a very simple "busy" desktop app that just checked the status and showed an appropriately colored button. Clicking on it started the session app, I think there was even some "Please get off soon" messaging later.

There's a lot of utility in that, and Tcl makes it easy to build and deploy. Especially compared to some kind of webapp thingamajig. You probably won't sell this as a product, but that's what scripting is about.

Note that Tcl's other killer app was "expect", which enabled you to script interactive terminal sessions, e.g. getting information or executing commands via ssh. That tied in well with a GUI to display said information or trigger the commands.

Whether Tcl as a language is worth it over just using e.g. Tkinter is another matter these days.

The GUI parts of the default git (git-gui/gitk) install are written in Tcl/Tk, by the way. This means that it's likely to be installed on a developer system. Even the Windows GIT package includes it, which adds to the ease of deployment/development.

I honestly think that it still makes sense. It’s a nicer language than most of the popular ones out there right now: more-easily embeddable than JavaScript, better designed than Lua. In a lot of way it would have been great had it replaced shell, although that would be a bit of a stretch.

Give it a shot!

It started out as a single script editor in under 1k lines of code written by someone else. I needed a syntax highlighting editor (so that I can see comments colored correctly in config files - useful if you use comments to turn configs on and off) so I took that script and added features. I kept the old key bindings to support old users of the original script (at its height I had like several dozen known users of the editor - people who wanted a better editor on routers and TiVo) but added key bindings to make it work more like Windows Notepad or Word/WordPerfect or SimpleText on the Mac etc, basically the "normal" GUI text editor keybinding, because I've gotten used to it. Even the Home key behavior I took from what I've come to expect on Mac code editors like BBEdit or CodeWarrior. So the ^C, ^V etc. are my additions to the script. The rest I inherited from the original script.

job security /s

Some communities actually promote that style. Particularly the terse array languages like APL or K/Q. Each file might only be half a page of code (you can do a lot with a single line of APL) so long and detailed names might not be necessary. You can look at all of Aaron Hsu's talks to get a better idea of this (particularly everything about his co-dfns compiler). He wrote thousands of pages of code to finally get to the final compiler that is a single page of code (fits on a t-shirt).

Looking at the scripts, they're mostly wrappers intended to be called on the file or a selection, so closer to a macro, shortcut, vim mapping etc. instead of a general purpose executable name. So closer to "C-x C-k" than "M-x save-buffers-kill-terminal".

(Most of them seem to have parameters, so it wouldn't make sense to golf this even further and have a exec command that just accepts one letter)

It's because they're easy for me to remember and easy for me to type. No other reason. a=awk, c=git commit, g=go, r=replace, s=sed and u=undo (obviously z would work just as well for undo). The core idea was commands in the editor is just any executable in your system instead of a custom scripting language - kind of like CGI. You are free to implement commands in bash, tcl, javascript etc.