Topics in Tcl Programming | Hacker News Reader

Topics in Tcl Programming

magicsplat.com

I started with Don Libes' classic book on Tcl/Expect[1] and am moving on to the 3rd edition of Clif Flynt's book[2].

Someone in #tcl on Freenode suggested that this set of essays would be a good resource for exploring some of the new/er features in Tcl.

I'm experimenting with using Tcl as a basis for rapid prototyping and testing[4] of services and service compositions built with docker and docker-compose[5].

It would be awesome if O'Reilly would consider making Exploring Expect[1] an Open Book[3] – it's an "oldie but goodie"!

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do

[2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780123847171.do

[3] http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/

[4] http://caiusproject.com/

[5] https://github.com/docker/compose

I'd like to add Welch's Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk [1]. I used it for learning TCL for an internship and it was not a bad experience for an undergrad.

[1] http://www.beedub.com/book/

Wow, people still develop with Tcl? That's not me being an ass; I'm genuinely surprised and delighted. Tcl is an old-school way of getting things done; it's not sexy like Ruby or Node. But its time to functional program is refreshingly low.

I'm new to Tcl myself, though I've seen it mentioned here and there for many years. It seems that, like Perl, the language and its ecosystem have continued to evolve while many folks' impressions of it are linked to an earlier stage of development.

To be more precise, consider the face of Perl that's presented by the Modern Perl book[1]. It's quite elegant, really, and that "way of Perl" has been around for more than several years, but many negative impressions of the language come from the "line noise" days of earlier perls, both by way of lore and legacy code that is still in production.

Tcl 8.6.3, the current release, has a wealth of great features[2] including tail calls, coroutines, lambda functions, and a robust core object system. I imagine that relatively few former Tcl pogrammers, who moved on to other technologies over the last decade, are aware of those developments.

[1] http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/

[2] http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html

Whoa! Adtivestate's license for the community edition is quite restrictive:

Dev and test machines (non-production) only

http://www.activestate.com/languages/compare-editions

I am glad to see that there are other binary distributions available for a wide variety of OSs, including Android:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/668

The source distributions don't have any such restrictions, as far as I'm aware, being wholly covered by a BSD-like license.

The "community", "business" and "enterprise" distinctions, and their respective costs/restrictions, refer solely to ActiveState's particular distributions.

If I remember correctly, ActiveState has been in business for two decades, their news goes back to 1998, and I remember using their Perl for Windows in 1998, so they seem to be doing something right.

What I remember from back in the '90s was that you paid them for polish, support and running well on alien systems like Windows. When I first used them, it was in a "Windows Shop" (well, I was the 2nd programmer :-), and their Perl was a trivial to get running version which then allowed me to show what such a language could do for the right tasks, e.g. an IIS backend page in it instead of Javascript or VB, or quickly importing a database of Nielson advertising categories for a contract with them.

I have the greatest respect and regard for ActiveState, and I am grateful for their community editions. I believe that they were pioneers in this at a time when one either had to spend a lot of money, or go through the headache of compiling your own distribution if you wanted to use a half-way decent language on Windows, even just to learn.

It makes good sense to buy a license if one is going to use one of their products commercially because the value that they add is well worth the price.

I just hadn't realized that I would be contravening the license agreement if I had used one of their community editions to make money.

Tcl is awesome for building cross-platform GUI's when used with Tk. Python's Tkinter and Dlang's Tkd are simple wrappers to provide GUI toolkits for those languages too.

Tcl is perfect for rapid application development and proof of concept algorithm innovations. Used it to develop search engines, pattern matchers and other analytics related to text mining and knowledge discovery. The R&D100 award was won with it too in addition to the development of a few machine learning methods with Michael I. Jordan and David Blei: "Statistical modeling of biomedical corpora: mining the Caenorhabditis Genetic Center Bibliography for genes related to life span" - Blei DM1, Franks K, Jordan MI, Mian IS. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868 - . http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2008/07/09/berkeley-... Hey, everything's a string!

There's really not a thing I can't do in TcL. I move back and forth from Python and TcL all of the time. I had Tcl before I had Python and it's quite mature which makes sense considering how long it's been around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com