On Fri, October 26, 2007 10:15 pm, Stewart Stremler wrote: > begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 07:12:00PM -0700: >> On Fri, October 26, 2007 6:46 pm, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > [snip] >> > No, there isn't always an easier/different way. This is part of the >> > reason why I don't bother to examine Tcl more. I saw this tendency in >> > the Tcl bunch back at 8.0, "If we don't have it, you don't need it." >> > >> > That's fine. But if I need it, and you don't have it, I ain't gonna >> use >> > your bloody language. > > Beware those languages that have everything. > >> I think you're being a little harsh. It has threads. What they're saying >> is, if you _think_ you need threads, you probably don't. This may not be >> true of you but may still be true in the main. > > This might be a reflection more on the usablility of TCL threads than of > the concept of threads (or other concurrency mechanisms). "We have it, > but it's not really a very good mechanism, so do it some other way." > >
I don't think that's the intent at all. If I can address this by analogy in an area where I know more about what I'm talking about, frequently people new to Tcl (especially from perl) say, "this language sucks, it doesn't have fork." But if they stick around long enough to hear the patient answer (because Andy's take notwithstanding, I have always found the Tcl community to be courteous and helpful ... except when trolled), you don't need fork, and fork isn't even vaguely transportable across platforms. If you need child processes, you can have them more easily and with better interprocess communication using slave interpreters in Tcl. It's a better solution and a perfect example of why good scripting languages can be a better choice for app development than C. I feel confident that threads weren't added to Tcl politically, but rather because the core team decided that there were valid programming challenges that required threads. I feel equally confident that they tell newbies that threads are rarely the way to attack a problem because there are better ways in Tcl to attack thread-like programming challenges. BTW, now that you guys have fully hijacked this thread, would you mind terribly trimming all references to "mythtv" from the subject line? The posts are sorting into my mythtv mail folder which is a "delete first and ask questions afterwards" folder (unbelievable level of dithering traffic with occasional gems). TIA, <wonder where Darren is hiding on this thread> -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
