Mark,
Could you elaborate on why going back to Tcl, after having used Perl, really hurts? Is it the object orientation versus procedural style, or something else?
As for "upvar" ... it isn't much worse than pointers in "C", is it? And I bet that you use pointers all the time when you're doing stuff with C.
So "object orientation" is far more mature than procedural now? That's funny, I would have thought it was the other way around. 😉
Having said that, I think there's no doubt that OOP almost always provides a better way to write large programs than procedural programming does. But I am questioning if it is all that constructive to at this stage - given the established and well-proven structure OpenACS has today - introduce a new obstacle towards learning how existing packages work and how to develop new ones.
Putting an example package in contrib, that folks can look at for inspiration if they want to write custom code in OO style, is one thing (Herr Neumann, please do!) ... It is another thing to endorse XOTcl and divert scarse OACS developper resources to rewriting existing packages. That would have to be a fork of this toolkit, IMHO.
