Anyway, the most relevant quote from John Ousterhout himself is:
| I didn't design Tcl for building huge programs with 10's or 100's of
| thousands of lines of Tcl, and I've been pretty surprised that people
| have used it for huge programs. What's even more surprising to me is
| that in some cases the resulting applications appear to be manageable.
| This certainly isn't what I intended the language for, but the
| results haven't been as bad as I would have guessed.
<http://minsky.med.virginia.edu/sdm7g/LangCrit/Tcl/JohnOusterhout.reply>
In my opinion, not "as bad as I would have guessed" is not good enough.
That's why I haven't particularly objected to safe-tcl for enabled-mail
applications, where the scripts are typically going to be in that
< 100 lines range, but I am frightened at the intent to turn it into
a general purpose distributed programming language. ( The fact that
Sun is also promoting another (almost Python-like ;-) language - Java -
for distributed applications, shows that they are also aware of Tcl's
limitations. )
---| Steven D. Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU> |---
---| Computer Systems Engineer University of Virginia |---
---| Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics |---
---| Box 449 Health Science Center Charlottesville,VA 22908 |---
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 14:33:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Steven D. Majewski <sdm7g@virginia.edu>
To: conway@server.cs.virginia.edu
Cc: python-list@cwi.nl
Subject: Re: Opinions? Tcl Python Perl, Virtues/failings
On Thu, 30 Mar 1995 mjc4y@server.cs.virginia.edu wrote:
>
> I forwarded Ken's mail off to wayne@icemcfd.com who keeps a pretty
> interesting collection of articles on this subject, that many of you
> might already know about:
>
> http://icemcfd.com/tcl/comparison.html
Now that you've mentioned it:
Adam Sah has a revised version of his "Tcl Considered Harmful" at:
<ftp://ginsberg.cs.berkeley.edu:/pub/papers/asah/tcl-fear.html>
( The original was part of the Stallman "Why you should not use Tcl"
gnu.misc.discuss thread. )
I have some links to that, Wayne Christopher's comparisons, Adam Sah's
online papers, and a few other bits of that argument ( or was it a
"negation" ? ) at:
<http://minsky.med.virginia.edu/sdm7g/LangCrit/Tcl/>
... Which is part of the Programming Language Critiques page at :
<http://minsky.med.virginia.edu/sdm7g/LangCrit/>
... Which I haven't widely advertised until now, as I'm trying to squeeze
in time to finish construction of that page and clean up and reorganize
some of the "agents" stuff on my WWW-server.
---| Steven D. Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU> |---
---| Computer Systems Engineer University of Virginia |---
---| Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics |---
---| Box 449 Health Science Center Charlottesville,VA 22908 |---