Lan Barnes wrote:
On Thu, May 1, 2008 1:44 pm, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
In my option,
that's where Tcl/Tk lost the war.
OK, TIME OUT!
This American propensity of viewing everything as a conflict/football
game/war leads us down many stupid roads. The war on poverty (least
unsuccessful of the many wars I've seen). The war on drugs. "My 'battle'
with cancer."
How about the right tool for the problem?
Social community *is* part of "the right tool for the problem" whether
you like it or not.
And social community in things like programming language and operating
system tends to be winner take all by virtue of network effect and not
wanting to learn anything new (aka inertia). In that case,
war/conflict/football game is pretty close to the right metaphor.
Tcl may be the "right tool for the problem". But, is it a better or
different tool for the problem than Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. Probably
not by enough to switch anyone from one camp to another. See: Lua
(small), Erlang (concurrency) or Scheme/Lisp (metaprogramming) for
examples of "better or different" tool which is sufficiently so to pull
people *out* of an existing camp.
That was the Unix side. So, let's take a look at the Windows side of
the coin.
Is there a Tcl for the CLR or JVM? It appears there is for the JVM, but
the community seems pretty dead around that. Nothing obvious for the
CLR. Part of the reason why the "scripting languages" are gaining
ground on Windows is that suddenly they are "zero install". If your
code can be translated to CLR or JVM bytecode, it can be run without
requiring install permission from your local IT department.
So, on the Windows side, Tcl, in fact, seems to be a far inferior
solution than several other choices.
Social community is important. I'm sorry. I have a limited amount of
time and brainpower to expend digging things out for myself.
Occasionally, I want to be able to ask someone *else* for the solution.
The community needs to be vibrant enough that 90% of my needs are
already met even *before I know I have them*.
The Tcl community is starting to lag on that (see: lack of Gtk bindings
and CLR VM, for example). Complaining won't change that. Writing code,
finding someone to write code, or funding someone to write code are
really the only choices.
-a
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