The Tcl Programming Language: A Comprehensive Guide (2nd Edition)

My favorite Tcl story is a little side note about how Tcl could have been the language of the web[1]<p><pre><code> the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn&#x27;t yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest &quot;what if&quot; moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there&#x27;s a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I&#x27;m not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened. </code></pre> Too humble Dr. Ousterhout! It would have been a far better language.<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pldb.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;JohnOusterhout.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pldb.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;JohnOusterhout.html</a>

Funny that Tcl was mentioned today. I&#x27;ve recently been hacking on jimtcl[1] (a small footprint implementation of Tcl) to make objects multi-threaded safe, as that&#x27;s the core language that folk.computer[2] uses (the main authors are making the interpreter and reactive DB parallelizable rn, so I&#x27;ve been tinkering with how to reduce copying).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;msteveb&#x2F;jimtcl">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;msteveb&#x2F;jimtcl</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.computer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.computer&#x2F;</a>

Surprised no mentions of sqlite yet :) I&#x27;ve always associated Tcl with sqlite because of how much it is used in their test suite and how you can have a tcl interpreter as a virtual table. Very interesting and seemingly often overlooked little language.

&gt; Some content has been removed in the second edition of the book because of limits on the number of pages<p>Lol, wut? The literal only working &quot;buy it now&quot; link is to a PDF. Page limits my ass. Or maybe &quot;Paperback: 660 pages&quot; was dangerously close to the Devil himself springing forth from the pages and turning all your codebase into VBScript

I have known about Tcl since the 1990s. I remember Stallman advising not use it. Maybe he did not like the license?<p>Yesterday, over 30 years later I was forced to write my first code. Noticed that a Cisco switch had an incredibly bad ssh implemtation, so to automate some commands I needed expect scripting. Expect is based on Tcl.

I own the first edition of this book and it&#x27;s really good. I&#x27;ve written a few tcl scripts with it, but nothing major. Python just has the better ecosystem now for my needs. I might use tcl if I needed something really small though.

Nice memories of having our own AOLServer like clone, Vignette, routinely writing extensions in C, and also why since 2003 I tend to avoid languages without JIT&#x2F;AOT unless it is for banal OS and application scripting task.

I may have to learn its other half, Tk, as a side project of mine is starting to feel less like something I can pull off as a &quot;wizard&quot; on the command line. I had wrestled with wxPython many moons ago and, while I got through it, I felt like I had perhaps taken a wrong turn.<p>As a side note, while I have seen many UI elements over the decades, I cannot help but think that the wizard (or whatever you would like to call it) has somehow escaped being listed as a standard UI element. Perhaps it is too large to count for many.

There is a source release at:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tcl-lang.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;tcltk&#x2F;9.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tcl-lang.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;tcltk&#x2F;9.0.html</a><p>but I&#x27;m not seeing an easy binary download --- used to be that the availability of a pre-compiled version, nicely packaged which would install easily on one&#x27;s platform of choice made it wonderfully accessible to new users.<p>Is that not a focus of the project these days?

&gt; this immensely flexible and versatile language<p>I would be interested to know if anyone ever built anything non-trivial that didn&#x27;t turn into a complete mess due to TCL&#x27;s general type-flimsyness and &quot;everything is a string&quot; philosophy.

I had this book, it&#x27;s well written.

Is Tcl still a thing? At my first job I extended with a set of data-processing commands.

Best of the best. Bought it.