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Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by hardwaresofton on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @01:40PM (#9963227)
TCL is still a mainstay of IC (Integrated Circuit) development design and test. It was originally developed for that purpose, and it's deeply entrenched.

I personally think it should die a very quick (honorable) death.

Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by sigzero on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @05:42PM (#9964707)
> I personally think it should die a very quick (honorable) death.

No, I would disagree. I like Tcl. I like using Tcl. The community is very good as well. The Tcl maintainers are really good at what they do for Tcl and the community.

There is no reason IMO for it to die at all.

Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by hardwaresofton on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @11:01PM (#9965950)
These sound like things that could easily be said of any programming language -- anything in particular that makes TCL stand out? Pretty much all the useful features of TCL already exist in other modern (better) languages...

Why do you like TCL more than any other language (ex. Python, Lisp, etc)?

Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by rainer_muell on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @05:00PM (#9964447)
> I personally think it should die a very quick (honorable) death.

Mind elaborating?

Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by hardwaresofton on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @11:19PM (#9965990)
While TCL does a good job gluing together IC tools, there are many languages that are much more expressive, powerful, and even just as simple (with good DSL support), with larger communities and more modules to choose from that aren't being used because TCL is. TCL has always seemed to me to be the incumbent that prevented uses of more modern languages.

I can't think of one thing TCL does better than any of the languages that come after it that warrants keeping it around, outside of super easy C bindings and some light metaprogramming capability.

A lack of good resources on TCL also leads to people learning it all sorts of ways, and writing all sorts of (often buggy) code with it. Maybe that's just symptomatic of the companies at which I've used TCL, but I think it's pretty clear that there are way more good resources on something like lisp or python than there are on TCL (I mention lisp because if you squint and replace some [ ]s with ( )s, TCL looks almost like lisp)

A lot of my reasons aren't quite concrete, but in short, I think using an almost-dead language like TCL leads to stagnation of a code base. People aren't pushing boundaries, doing new things in TCL. There's definitely nothing wrong with having a no-surprises go-to language that just gets stuff done, but I just don't personally find TCL stimulating.

Maybe I'm just too much of a new-shiny-language hipster