Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by mroll on Saturday September 10, 2016 @05:27PM
(#12470961)
Wish more people understood this about tcl
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| on HN ]
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by pmontra on Saturday September 10, 2016 @06:50PM
(#12471227)
Maybe this is meta (the wish) :-)
I remember tcl in the early 90s then it disappeared from my radar, mostly web and mobile apps. Honest question: is it still relevant in some application area?
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by qwertyuiop924 on Saturday September 10, 2016 @07:07PM
(#12471293)
It's still great at what it was always great at: embedding, acting as a CLI, and doing random grunt work. It's Lua's main competitor, but it can also go toe-to-toe with python and ruby in terms of libraries in some areas (although by no means all of them). In particular, the ease of construction for graphical applications is arguably unmatched (IUP is probably the closest), SQLite was built to work with it, metakit is handy as well in the DB area, it has a great event loop, several OO models, solid unix integration, sold FFI and excellent embedding (as you'd expect), Starkits, which means you can distribute your whole TCL sourcetree as a single file, and a ton of other stuff.
So while it's not as popular, relevancy isn't an issue.
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by mroll on Saturday September 10, 2016 @11:25PM
(#12471877)
This comment is a great representation of tcl's relevance, which is nice to see because tcl is often dismissed nowadays by people who don't understand it
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by mroll on Saturday September 10, 2016 @08:32PM
(#12471531)
Hah yeah I realized that meta joke after I posted
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by pjmlp on Saturday September 10, 2016 @06:18PM
(#12471121)
Tcl was what made possible one of the best startups I had the privilege to be part of.
They had a Rails like stack in the first .com wave, but implemented in a mix of Tcl, Apache and C.
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by mroll on Saturday September 10, 2016 @06:43PM
(#12471209)
Can I get your email? Would love to hear about that stack
Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by pjmlp on Saturday September 10, 2016 @07:24PM
(#12471352)
It had an architecture similar to AOL Server, just that the founders did their own thing instead.
Tcl was used for almost everything, C for performance critical modules and DB FFI.
The interpreter was loaded as an Apache module.
We supported Informix, MS SQL Server, Sybase SQL Server and Oracle.
All major UNIX variants from late 99's and Windows NT/2000.