Contributors to [the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup] frequently
express concern that a decision to use Tcl is risky, because
the language might ... well, something might happen.

It's hard to answer unspecified fears rationally.  The well-defined
ones all turn out to be mistakes.  Will Java be better-supported?
Well, IBM and Sun have been supporting Java for all its worth, and
its portability in particular, and Tcl remains available for a wider
span of platforms.  Is Tcl vulnerable because its creator might not
support it?  In fact, [John Ousterhout] has been away from technical
leadership of the implementation since 1999 or so, and new versions
continue to appear.  Won't GNOME [themes], or .NET, or Ruby, or object-orientation, or ...,
leave Tcl behind?  Sure; in three to five years, each of these will
catch up with features Tcl already enjoys.  If that means, "leave
Tcl behind" to you, then Tcl is probably not a language that will
leave you comfortable.


Maybe Tcl will decline in any of several objective senses.
The evidence usually presented in support of such a prediction,
though, is demonstrably ... inconclusive.
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[LV] I would add to the above that when people say "Tcl doesn't have ..." followed by some function, what they ''seem'' to mean is "I want to do ..., but I don't want to code it myself, don't want to pay someone to code it, and don't want to have to download and build something other than the tcl.tar.gz or tcl.zip file."

That is a rather unfortunate attitude to take towards open source.
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[RS] Open source software lives as long at least one developer has the sources and can compile them. Tcl sure isn't a fashionable language, but you also often hear how people are surprised and ultimately converted. Yes, we are a minority - but we got The Cool Language! I'm not worried as long as [everything is a string].


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[Category Advocacy]