Tcl(ID:1602/tcl003)

Tool Command Language 

for Tool Command Language.  (pronounced "tickle")

John Ousterhout, UCB, then Sun, then Scriptics. A string language for issuing commands to interactive programs. Each application can extend tcl with its own set of commands.  

"I got the idea for Tcl while on sabbatical leave at DEC's Western Research Laboratory in the fall of 1987. I started actually implementing it when I got back to Berkeley in the spring of 1988; by summer of that year it was in use in some internal applications of ours, but there was no Tk. The first external releases of Tcl were in 1989, I believe. I started implementing Tk in 1989, and the first release of Tk was in 1991."

People:
Related languages
Tcl => expect   Written using
Tcl => FCL   Extension of
Tcl => WWWinda   Extension of
References:
  • Ousterhout, J. "Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language" view details
          in Proc 1990 Winter USENIX Conference view details
  • Phil Hughes "Guido van Rossum" Linux Journal Volume , Issue 68es (December 1999) view details Extract: Anecdote
    Phil: It seems like Python is starting to be taken really seriously in web development and so on. Is Python being taken seriously in academia? I guess I mean relative to Perl, because Perl isn't, as far as I can see.

    Guido: I would say Python is being taken a lot more seriously. There are language designers who don't approve of certain short cuts, or the fact that Python doesn't have static typing, or the fact that there are other languages out there that are as good as Python is, and again borrow all the good features from those languages.

    Phil: What languages?

    Guido: Some people think, for instance, that Dylan--which I think has a very academic flavor--is everything Python is plus so much more.

    Phil: Dylan? I've never heard of it.

    Guido: Well, that's exactly Dylan's problem. I don't know, but I think it started out as a LISP variant, with sort of an alternative syntax. The syntax was deliberately unLISPish in order not to scare off everyone who is not already brainwashed with LISP, because LISP has one of the biggest image problems of any programming language in the world.

    Phil: I had to learn LISP in college, and I can appreciate that! Keypunching parentheses is not my favorite thing.

    Guido: I like a lot of the concepts of LISP, but I strongly disagree with their approach to syntax, which happens to be the same approach Tcl has, more or less. Which is, there is no syntax, or it's so simple you have to do everything else outside the syntax.

    Phil: Is Tcl making it at all in academia?

    Guido: I am sort of removed from academia, so I don't quite know. I don't think so. I mean, one or two people I spoke to recently from academia had a very strong opinion that Python was a decent language and Perl and Tcl were not.


          in Proc 1990 Winter USENIX Conference view details