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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

No, Ruby died last month, but now it's cool again in a retro sort of way. Node.js is what's dying this week. Next month, Tcl is going to make a comeback.

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Oh God, I certainly hope so.

Everything is a string!

Seriously, I don't mind Tcl at all. Does that make me crazy?

Actually, internally, everything is not a string, and has not been that way since... 10+ years. Everything is representable as a string, though.

I actually like Tcl quite a bit even if I don't use it much these days:

http://www.amazon.com/Tcl-Toolkit-2nd-John-Ousterhout/dp/032... (See the cover for all of the authors' names :-)

A colleague told me about a Tcl feature called upvar. I contracted epilepsy on the spot. Luckily, this meant i couldn't listen while he told me about uplevel.

yes, TCL sucks.

No tcl is nice. It's expressive and functional. I love not having to use the shift key every two characters for expressions. upvar/uplevel are awesome for creating new language contructs and meta programming.

People ditched it because it wasn't cool, but it got the job done and remains useful and succinct.

> I love not having to use the shift key every two characters for expressions.

Just customize your keyboard layout, and reverse shift behaviour for the number row. There, better symbol access.

i sincerely think that what ruby just needs is just a really good wordpress alternative.

I disagree. The strength of ruby is in rapid development. It is not best for performance, installation or deployment. Therefore it's good for teams building software, but it will never be good for install-your-own open source software like WordPress. Since the vast majority of WordPress users never even look at the code there is absolutely nothing to be gained by not using PHP.

>[Ruby] is not best for performance, installation or deployment.

PHP isn't either, except that it's packaged well in Linux.

If there were good packages for Ruby in Debian, the only advantage that PHP would have is in being the shared hosting default. Both are pretty equally performant, and Ruby has the advantage of being a nicely designed language.

>there is absolutely nothing to be gained by not using PHP.

What is there to be gained by using PHP?

    <?= 'Hello World' ?>

Every language has advocates that believe that. The reality is that no one writes WordPress in any one of those languages because PHP, warts and all, is a language for getting things done.

no, the reality is that people write them all the time, then abandon the project.

For example in railsland, typo and mephisto were both popular at some point, and in djangoland there have been at least two dozens blog engines _I know of_.

There was a beautiful django conference video where the speaker asked "who is writing a blog engine in django" and about 9/10 of the room raised their hands.

EDIT: I concur, many language advocates believe that, but I think they are wrong for different reasons.

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