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Comment by 0x0203 | Hacker News Reader

Seems some of the listed advantages for Janet would also apply for tcl (small/simple, easy to learn, embeddable, usable as a shell, great for domain specific languages). It would be interesting, to me at least, to see a fan of Janet compare the two.

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I've only used Tcl briefly, mostly for automation which it's great at. But it's a Algol-like imperative language, doesn't have any type of macros and makes everything based on strings (which makes sense for automation) instead of lists, with all the tradeoffs that comes with.

It seems easier to figure out what the similarities are, because I think they're pretty few, they seem to differ more than they are similar.

Tcl being based on strings creates the same problems like in bash scripts, i.e. it is too easy to misuse the quotation rules, leading to subtle bugs.

Using for scripting LISP-like languages is much more foolproof, especially for more complex scripts.

Ok, but now I want to embed Janet in a TCL program

Tcl is pretty good at functional-programming type stuff, and it can absolutely do anything that you could do with a macro. It isn't Algol-like at all imo, maybe beyond some superficial syntax. It feels a lot more like if LISP and Bash had a baby out of wedlock.

(I've written a lot of Tcl over the years and it'll always have a spot in my heart)

Janet is faster, but lacks anything like tk. It's probably also quicker to learn, as you don't get into complex evaluation structure until you start messing around with quasiquotes, while tcl requires you to understand mixing 3 different layers of evaluation right off the bat. tcl's vm imo is easier to understand as well.

tcl if you want a UI, janet if you want an embedded scripting language.

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