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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

Happy birthday Tcl! Let us use this moment to commemorate our enormous luck that you didn't spread further.

Tcl spread further than you think, if you think computing begins and ends at websites. I shake my head sadly when I see guys running around reinventing badly all the things Tcl did well. Node.js being one of the most egregious examples, but there are others, Enaml, Lua, the vast tomes written on Ruby deployment when it's trivial in Tcl...

I teach a lot of programming classes (mostly Ruby and Python), and it never ceases to surprise me to discover how many people are still working in Tcl. It would seem that Tcl really took over a lot of the embedded world, such that companies working on routers and such still use it, or at least did so until recently.

I never loved Tcl, but it was a very clever language for its time, and did wonders to justify the acceptability of doing things in "just" a scripting language.

As an industry, we've got to get over this notion of "still", it's like civil engineers saying are you still making things out of concrete? 25 years I would say is a proven, mature technology, not obsolete. Think how much progress we could make if we didn't reinvent the wheel every few years...

Yeah, but I'm glad we don't still use corduroyed roads.

Tcl is a wheel worth reinventing.

Perhaps that's why it's been reimplemented so many times :-) - see http://wiki.tcl.tk/17975

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