Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong (2010)

I spent a lot of time with Tcl, first at company some friends and I started in the late '90s, and then at Arbor Networks, where I dragged it into their service provider product. In a Lisp, code is trivially parsed because everything is a tree of conses, and the language derives tremendous power from that. In Tcl, code is trivially parsed because everything is a string, and the language is hamstrung by it; it's a little like trying to…

There is some interesting stuff here, but if you want a one-sentence explanation of why Tcl has declined I'd suggest: It doesn't have a hook. What does Tcl offer? Half this article is about Tk, but Tk is (a) a generic GUI toolkit, and therefore competing directly against everything from Java Swing to Flash to (the big winner) HTML/JS/CSS. And (b) not Tcl-specific, right? Didn't I see Perl bindings for Tk go by? As an embeddable language Tcl somehow got…

My memories of using Tcl are that the language was shockingly simple (every line is a command, everything is a string), but as long as your goal was also simple, you could bang things out and be happy. As a C programmer, writing the extension glue code was tedious but straightforward (this as way pre-SWIG), and then the ability to whip up some kind of GUI (blissfully absent any UI design concerns, as noted in the article) for that C…