Re: Tweets from a Lua vs. Tcl "Debate"

[William Ahern <william@...>]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 11:59:59AM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> People still use tcl?!
> 
> [granted I last used it circa 1993, but it was a very painful
> experience...]
> 

Tk rocks, and it's implemented in Tcl. So you have to take the good with the
bad. Fortunately Tk bindings don't usually require you to fiddle with Tcl.

Interestingly, Tcl/Tk ships with OS X by default. Or it did last time I
spent the effort to rule out XCode as the culprit. So Tcl/Tk is pretty much
_the_ native GUI toolkit on Unix, including Linux, *BSD, OS X, and Solaris.
No assembly required; batteries included.

Also, the Tcl community has been vigorously improving their VM, native
widgeting, and other infrastructure over the years, including adding a PEG
library and coroutines.

It's annoying, though, that whenever I tell someone about Lua, the first
question out of their mouth is "why not use Lua?". It's annoying because Tcl
isn't really as irrelevant as you'd think, so you can't simply dismiss the
question as the ramblings of some confused time traveler from the 90s.