[supremesaboteur]

Stallman was criticising the lack of arrays etc in Tcl which stops it from being used for building complex applications. Tcl author John Ousterhout responded[1] to this by saying that Tcl is a mere glue language and not a replacement for C/C++ and we need both type of languages.

If you look at today's language landscape, you have langauges like C, C++, Java etc occupying the "serious" niche and languages like Python etc occupying the "glue" niche ( although sometimes these languages do exchange roles ). The "glue" languages that succeeded did have support for arrays etc.

I think both parties have been proven right, at least partially.

[1] http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html

[rbehrends]

> The "glue" languages that succeeded did have support for arrays etc.

For what it's worth, Tcl has had support for O(1) array indexing since 8.0 in 1997. That's because starting with 8.0, Tcl values had both an efficient internal representation and an external string representation. It's not a perfect solution, because it's not always transparent when (inefficient) transformations between representations take place, but it's definitely possible.

[SwellJoe]

Ousterhout's response is awesome. More interesting and accurately predictive, I think, than RMS' (partly because he makes fewer predictions and merely suggests trusting developers to pick what they like).

I like RMS for what he's done for Free Software, but I rarely find myself agreeing with him wholeheartedly on technical questions.