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by lmm
4232 days ago
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I know a couple of startuppy companies that are still using it, but it certainly feels like a language in decline. There's a lot that's elegant about it, but the syntax is awkward in practice, and compared to e.g. Python there are fewer libraries available and no really compelling advantage, IMO. It's a language that deserves better than it got - it should've become the standard for *nix config files (thanks RMS for the mess we have now). It should've been the language Sun pushed to run everywhere (it even supported java-style applets in web pages, without the slow vm startup). It should've filled the Lua niche (to a certain extent it did) as an embeddable scripting language. It should've filled the perl niche - it had good support for invoking external executables in a shell-scripting role, and could even be used as a login shell; it had good regex support, and was a first-class programming language that could be used for web backends. Heck, it even did reactive I/O in the very early days (IIRC there was a fantastic server product that was caught up in the demise of Netscape or AOL or some such) - it should've been Node too. But it always felt a bit unloved at Sun, especially post-Java (and to be fair, who can blame them when Java was that popular?), and it somehow never seemed to reach critical mass. |
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I believe you're referring to the ArsDigita Community System, which was written in Tcl, and which ran on top of AOLServer, a web server that supported Tcl as a scripting language.
(ArsDigita's rise and fall was a classic dotcom bubble story, complete with Aeron chairs, fancy cars, greedy VCs, founders with big egos, lawsuits, etc.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita_Community_System
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOLserver