Re:Advantages of Tcl over Lisp (2005)
by StevePerkins on Sunday October 29, 2017 @08:18PM
(#15582352)
Some more information...
AOLServer was actually bought by AOL; originally it was NaviServer. It was open sourced in 1999 by AOL.
It's a fantastic server, imo, and some of the technology developed for it were eventually brought into the Tcl core (not exactly, but the general approaches) when multi-threading was added. At least, that's my understanding.
AOLServer was great! I used it for a ton of stuff, the most complex being a marketplace for data. It was almost trivially easy to do fast, maintainable, programmable business logic as part of a complex web site. Having to switch over to the likes of Flask on Apache (not that Flask isn't a decent framework) was a major step back for development, testing and maintenance.
Re:Advantages of Tcl over Lisp (2005)
by schemathings on Monday October 30, 2017 @01:24AM
(#15583245)
Wow, that takes me back! Wrote a fair bit of code on AOLserver.
Yeah I know about that, but there was a lot more sort of devops before devops was a thing tools written in tcl as well there.
What sorts of things did these tools do?
I'm obviously aware you can't be precisely specific, but I imagine that the level of detail you _can_ share is probably still very interesting.
Re:Advantages of Tcl over Lisp (2005)
by brianbaquiran on Monday October 30, 2017 @06:30AM
(#15584060)
One of the most popular "devops before devops was a thing" tools was Expect, which simulated an interactive session over Telnet or SSH. It effectively allowed ops to automate anything that could be done in a terminal.
Expect is a great tool and was widely used for such automation (including by EDA companies - along with Tcl), I've read. I tried it some and read the book about Expect by Don Libes, Expect's creator. A very good book, with a unique writing style, that I somewhat can't find words to describe well.
Do you know anyone at AOL who might be receptive to a request to open source their legacy Tcl code?
It might be interesting to hear one of the old school aol guys talk about it now that they’re decomming a lot of that finally. There was a lot of interesting stuff there that should have been open sourced decades ago and never was.