Version 7 of Why you should not use Tcl

Updated 2014-04-04 20:27:33 by EMJ

TR - Richard Stallman is an important figure in the OpenSource community. Many many years ago (24 September 1994) he started a thread on comp.lang.tcl, which is perhaps one of the longest in this group with 417 postings:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_thread/thread/ec95c6b7e531a9a8/8ea836c1005a0e78

It starts like this ...

 [[Please redistribute wherever appropriate.]]

                     Why you should not use Tcl
                        Richard Stallman, GNU Project

 As interest builds in extensible application programs and tools, and
 some programmers are tempted to use Tcl, we should not forget the
 lessons learned from the first widely used extensible text
 editor--Emacs.

 The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should
 not be a mere "extension language".  It should be a real programming
 language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs.
 Because people will want to do that!

 Extensions are often large, complex programs in their own right,
 and the people who write them deserve the same facilities
 that other programmers rely on.

And so on. If you have nothing else to do, read this thread and see on this Wiki why Tcl is alive and well 12 years later ...

(Btw., John Ousterhout's answer followed two days later in this thread as post number 71)

RLH Lo these many years later... I read that and think he was an arse for posting that and I wasn't even programming then.


This link [L1 ] is titled Your Ignorance Does Not Make a Programming Language Suck.


CGM See also Thomas Lord's 'An Account of Tcl War' [L2 ]