I really, really like that "Why?" explanation page; I feel like many projects could benefit from copying that idea.<p>Frequently, the first thought I have when I see projects is, "okay, neat, but why does this exist?", and the answer takes some digging. It's wonderful that in this example the answer is made so obvious.
Always nice to see Tcl/Tk get attention, it's a language I've often found quite useful. Seems like I'd heard of "L" before in connection with Tcl/Tk, but not sure it was the same thing as Little.<p>Certainly seems it could be a good alternative, a quick look at the syntax makes me think of it like a kind of typed Javascript. The ability to tap into the underlying language, e.g., event loop, Tk UI, coroutines, should be an advantage.<p>There probably is a way to install Little when TclTk 8.6 (and extensions) are already installed (there's a warning about trashing the pre-installed binaries), and not have problems due to moving or replacing existing libraries that applications depend on finding in established locations.
Banging out GUIs in Tk is a delight when contrasted with developing in whatever javascript framework is popular this hour. Tcl itself is pragmatic to an extreme; a great framework for both organizing large projects and heaping up fast primitives written in C.<p>Anyway, great job! I hope Little's syntactic sugar gets more people exploring Tcl/Tk. Can't wait to give it a whirl.
From the "L Programming Language" PDF:<p><pre><code> “It’s like perl without the nastiest bits.”
</code></pre>
I think that really does capture the spirit of what this language looks like. I'm not sure it will reach any kind of general applicability, but it seems like a tasteful nod to the extensible nature of Tcl either way. Curious to see the inclusion of PCRE over Tcl's ARE which I thought was pretty routinely trotted out as a better performing, more limited, RE engine.
I haven't tried this yet, I've just looked at the examples in the docs. However, I think this could be pretty cool.<p>I think the combination of the Perl influences with the possibility (which I'm interested in, but haven't proven yet) of using this with Tclkit (a statically linked version of Tcl that can just be copied over for deployment) might make this a nice cross platform replacement for the kind of things I might otherwise want to do in Awk.<p>Tcl itself is also certainly a good cross platform Awk replacement, but heavy regex stuff seems like it might be a bit more concise with this syntax than in Tcl itself.
Looks like a very interesting little language, I enjoyed working with TCL a fair bit due to things like wish being so interactive. It's also interesting that they added pointers to TCL, which solves my biggest gripe with TCL.