On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Mate Wierdl wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 1998 at 10:13:59AM -0500, Cedric Puddy wrote:
>
> > There was a (massive) discussion (featuring
> > John Ousterhout "the tcl guy" and Richard Stallman
> > [who seems to be responsible for the GNU architecure!],
> > and lots of other very knowledgable people) about
> > Tcl VS. other scripting languages. Most heavily
> > featured as an alternative was scheme.
> >
> > The messages were all collected and arranged at:
> >
> > http://icemcfd.com/tcl/comparison.html
>
> Looks very interesting. The GNU people seem to have made up their mind(s).
> What was the objection against scheme here?
>
> ---
> Mate Wierdl | Dept. of Math. Sciences | University of Memphis
One of the fundemental differences of opinion seemed to be this:
- Ousterhout felt that a "two-piece exstensibe" concep
was the way to go. His belief is that it is a Good Thing
to have a _simple_ high level "lego" oriented language
that _easily_ hooks into a _real_ general purpose language.
- Stallman believes that the s ripting language, in and of itself
should be a full scale language that doesn't worry about
interfaceing cleanly with other languages. It should be fully
capable of writing large sections of the application that uses
it.
I like Ousterhouts approach because I know very few programing languages,
and because the focus of what I do is very non-programming
oriented I am not in practice when it comes to learning all kinds of new
scripting languages. I own many tools that are scriptable. I script
almost none of them because they mostly all use something different
between them all. I just can't be bothered. With Ousterhouts
approach there is more likely hood, in my mind, that the basic
functionality of the program will be exposed in a very
simple format, and that if I wish to go beyond that, I
would have to do considerably more work. I would expect that if I needed
to
go beyond "that" that I would be doing something complicated/
unexpected anyway, and therefore wouldn't mind a learning curve
for a skill I would be able to use again anyway (ie, straight C).
There was also much discussion of fine grained technical merits of
Tcl and many other scripting languages, most of which I just skipped
over. :)
-Cedric
-
| CCj/ClearLine - Unix/NT Administration and TCP/IP Network Services
| 118 Louisa Street, Kitchener, Ontario, N2H 5M3, 519-884-0701
\____________________________________________________________________
Cedric Puddy, IS Director [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Key Available at: http://www.thinkers.org/cedric
