Re:Learn X in Y minutes – Tcl
by gecko on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @10:29AM
(#10116709)
I think you're being overdramatic, but since you didn't explain why you think Tcl is "the worst parody of a language since BASIC and Brainfuck", I can't really evaluate that. I can name lots of things about Tcl that are actually very pleasant, including the robust libraries, the homoiconic syntax, the ease of extending the language, the quickness that newbies can pick it up, and the performance (which is roughly on par with CPython, Perl and the like). What things have you hit that resulted in such an amazingly strong negative response?
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The fact that there are no data types but only strings. The necessity to navigate dynamic scoping with `upvar` & siblings. The load of having to simulate locality of reference with fancy array indexes. It may be nice for simple string-crunching scripts but a complex application is living hell. You wouldn't use /bin/sh for that, either.
Sounds like you haven't used Tcl since the early 1990's, you may want to check your facts. Tcl has had boolean, integer, floating point, list, dictionary, and other data types besides strings since 1997. The fact that Tcl will convert all of these values into strings when asked is immensely useful. Likewise, Tcl has had object oriented extensions since the early 1990's, and as of the last few years has OO built into the core, so you can easily build your data structures to suit.