Happy 15th Birthday to Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

Cool! That's me on the cover: http://www.informit.com/store/LargeCover.aspx?isbn=032160175... :-)

(BTW, they're talking about the book by J.O, Tcl is older than 15 years, probably closer to 20).

Tcl is an amazing language. Very underrated. It's "EIAS" (everything is a string) philosophy, and the duality of strings and lists is very very powerful. It's got one of the best-documented and precisely written standard libraries I've ever seen (and the "extended standard library" tcllib is of similar quality).

E.g., if some script returns "350 seconds to execute command <more stuff here>" you can hold your nose and just treat the string as a list and extract the 0th element :) ('lindex $return 0').

It's speed leaves much to be desired. My ideal stack would in a large project would be:

1. Tcl shell on top 2. ... talking to either Python or C/C++ below

Tcl gave me my first taste of scripting, but even more of a revelation was that I could bury a Tcl interpreter in a C program and use Tcl to control all the C modules. It made it really easy to dynamically change the behavior of a running server. Of course security was a bit of an issue, but in 1992 the net was still relatively calm.

Nice to see a new Tcl book on the bookshelves