Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)

Watching someone learns basics of programming in Python, I realized that Python is actually not that easy to learn for beginners as I thought: 1. Types in Python are implicit. It's really hard to explain that they need to always think about what type something is, especially when they haven't grasped the concept of types yet. 2. Indentation as part of the language. I thought it's a great thing for beginners, but it's actually confuses beginners that empty space affects…

A little Tcl story. When John Ousterhout interviewed me to be VP of Engineering at the Tcl company (Scriptics) many years ago I told him I knew nothing about Tcl at all. He told me that the two great virtues of Tcl were that it was incredibly easy to learn and had very powerful regular expression facilities (I think he was trying to contrast with Perl which also has great regular expressions). I blurted out "Don't those two things contradict…

Another excellent aspect of Tcl I found is extensibility of JO's C implementation. At some point I needed to write some native code for speed and making this visible to the Tcl interpreter was a pleasure. Plus the codebase is so clean and well written.

An interesting corollary to concept 5 (the fact that everything in Tcl is a string) is that this means that Tcl is actually homoiconic. It does it completely differently from Lisp, but still ends up in the same place: code and data have the same representation.