[ale] Re: Tcl? (was: Re: [ale] Ale Inc.? (was RE: [ale] surviving sans work)

[John Wells]

All very good points.  Since assuming responsibility
for this project, I've spent many hours flabbergasted
at their choice of tcl as a language.  It may be good
for smaller projects and utilities, but for a large
telecom application it's almost unmanageable.  I get
the feel that, given the age of the application
(approx. 10 years old), it was most likely one of
those "whipped up a prototype in a weekend and the
prototype became the product" sort of thing.  I see a
lot of those.  It works (most of the time) albeit
unattractively, so I guess it's got that going for it
;-).

John

--- Joseph A Knapka <jknapka at earthlink.net> wrote:
> John Wells wrote:
> > 
> > > seem. Java and Perl are among the horriblest.
> > >
> > > My opinion, of course :-)
> > >
> > 
> > I'm surprised you choose tcl over perl.  Tcl has
> got
> > to be one of the ugliest languages I've had the
> > displeasure of using.  I should know, I maintain a
> > project consisting of over 300,000 lines.
> 
> That's way too big for a Tcl app. The tools for
> programming in the large just aren't there, and all
> the hacks to provide them (eg [incr Tcl]) leave me
> cold.
> 
> >  It's great
> > if you're doing simple string or list processing
> but
> > try representing something advanced (i.e., data
> > structures like linked lists, multidimensional
> arrays)
> > and you begin to see it's underbelly.  From that
> point
> > on, everything you do feels like a dirty hack.  In
> > fact, there's no such thing as an array in
> > tcl...everything's a hash table...
> 
> Tcl's point is to make simple scripting tasks over
> existing data structures and APIs easy. And that it
> does very well. Unfortunately, it does leave out the
> features needed to do clean data abstraction,
> which is why it's no longer among the languages I
> use every day. Tcl used well is very easy to read
> and understand, but when used for tasks that are
> beyond its ken, it does get ugly. (Perl, however,
> is ugly from the moment the rising sun touches its
> face :)
> 
> > I'm sure I'm completely overlooking some of its
> > benefits.  I know they have to be there to be
> some,
> > and I'm sure the tight integration with tk
> provides a
> > few.
> 
> Yes, Tk is really the biggest win for Tcl users.
> Python makes using Tk substantially easier than
> Tcl does, however. Though unfortunately, Python
> actually uses an embedded Tcl interpreter to
> interact with Tk, which is probably a significant
> performance hit. People doing new code in Python
> should probably use wxPython or something else
> instead. Or <plug> Anygui <URL: http://anygui.org>,
> the platform-neutral GUI API for Python: write
> your UI and run it under Tk, wx, Win32, Qt, Gtk,
> curses, and even a plain text console, unchanged.
> It's still quite alpha-y, but someday it will rule
> the world, bwahahaha </plug>.
> 
> >  I thought it interesting that RedHat used tcl/tk
> > to develop Source Navigator.
> > 
> > Just my two cents...
> 
> Accepted and deposited in my Swiss bank account.
> 
> -- Joe
> "I should like to close this book by sticking out
> any part of my neck
>  which is not yet exposed, and making a few
> predictions about how the
>  problem of quantum gravity will in the end be
> solved."
>  --- Physicist Lee Smolin, "Three Roads to Quantum
Gravity"


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