Tcl is excellent, not sucky. Or rather, IMNSHO, the only way anyone
can legimately claim that Tcl sucks is by taking the stance - the
supportable stance, in my opinion - that
all programming
languages suck, to greater or lesser degrees. And on that measure,
Tcl sucks much less than most. Overall, I consider Tcl a major asset
to OpenACS, not a hindrance.
I think this may largely be because Tcl does a lot of stuff well, and
nothing really wrong. There are various useful things which
it does not even attempt to do at all. (Perhaps closures,
continuations, and macros as in Scheme. Certainly vector orientation,
matrix math, and sohpisticated statistical libraries, as found in S
and its open-source dialect
and R.
One could go on and on listing things like static type inference,
etc.)
To use one example I am intimately familiar with, although S is a very
useful language overall, it feels replete with small but obnoxious
legacy design and implementation flaws. So even though I use S for
things I would never want to use Tcl for, I would argue that Tcl is
the better designed language overall. Apples and oranges there, but
if you have to compare them, Tcl looks like the cleaner fruit to me.
A language which locks you into broken misdesigned features (as seems
very common) is much worse than simply staying out of the way and
giving you tools to extend the language as you need (Tcl does; most
non-Lisp languages do not). Tcl seems to strike a good balance there.
I naively hope to live long enough to see programming languages which
are an order of magnitude or more better than what we have now. (And
demonstrated as such scientifically; not just via hand-wavy
philosophizing like I'm doing here.) Maybe from those Haskell-using
academics. Maybe atypical practitioners like
Jean-Claude Wippler
will come through with
something.
Or both. And Tcl, Python, Scheme, and Ruby will all seem more
backward than Fortran 77 and COBOL seem today. I don't see that
happening terribly soon, though.
Anyway, probably none of this is news to anyone here, so enough of my
rambling. I just wanted to emphasize that technically anyway
(ignoring marketing), Tcl is a large net asset.
