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by bsder
620 days ago
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The biggest problem with Tcl is the fact that C won. This means that "" and {} are expected to work a certain way from C and when you hit Tcl you are HORRIBLY confused. It's especially confusing as {} is simply quoting and has nothing to do with scope. The fact that Tcl is written such that {} is used with indentation in if-statements muddies the issue even further. I suspect that a choice of ` (backtick) for Tcl " and " instead of Tcl {} would have made Tcl way less confusing to the vast majority of programmers. I understand why things weren't done that way--having the ability to know that your quote has different characters for open vs close is very valuable for efficient parsing. Nevertheless, the Tcl choices were unfortunate given the way history played out. |
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Scopes are special syntactic forms that delegate variable substitution to the associated procedures. For example, a "for" statement evaluates the body of the function after substituting the loop variable. In a string based language, that's basically the same as expressing the scope in a string form where the string content is passed verbatim as an argument without variable substitution or function invocation.
Having used Tcl extensively back in the day, I am not sure that this syntactic cleverness really was a major impediment to adoption. It was just something to learn. Same was true with [] meaning lisp-like function calling rather than array definition.
Baseline Tcl's biggest challenge, in my opinion, was providing mechanisms to write modular code for larger programs and data encapsulation. Core Tcl put off decisions about the appropriate mechanisms to do so by only providing "namespaces" as a building block for higher level third-party syntax. That led to fragmentation at a time when other languages were gaining popularity.