Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,comp.lang.tcl,comp.lang.scheme
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From: wave@media.mit.edu (Michael B. Johnson)
Subject: Re: Why you should not use Tcl
Message-ID: <1994Sep26.215943.17665@news.media.mit.edu>
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Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <9409232314.AA29957@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <366unq$o0u@sophia.inria.fr>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 21:59:43 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu gnu.misc.discuss:18300 comp.lang.tcl:19313 comp.lang.scheme:9918

In article <366unq$o0u@sophia.inria.fr> eal@espace.cma.fr (Edward Lee) writes:
>>
>>Tcl has real strengths, not the least among them is its light
>>weight.  Make it a "real programming language", and you remove
>>this advantage.  But why not get the facilities you need
>>through C?  If you need fast array computations, use C,
>>or better yet, some compiled version of a special-purpose
>>language, like Matlab.
>>

Hear, hear.  I've been using tcl for around 5 years, and besides the 
truly pragmatic reasons to use it (unencumbered source code license,
amazing support from comp.lang.tcl, very portable core, etc.) there
is one philosophical reason which has kept me from switching to a 
"purer" language like Scheme.  Simply put, tcl was built to do exactly
what I use it for - serve as an extensible, embeddable scripting
language, where it's straightforward to do database-like accessing
of variables and procedures.  Sure, I'd like it to be faster, but in
the mean time, I'm getting an enormous amount of work done.  If the
GNU folks come out with an embeddable extensible scripting language
that is as portable as tcl while staying at an equivalent "cost" 
with regard to code size and gives me much higher performance, I'll
certainly give it a look, but in the mean time, I'm getting a
huge amount of work done with tcl.

As always, thanks to John and this community for the fine job done
with tcl.



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