Interesting footnote: the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn’t yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest “what if” moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there’s a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I’m not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened.
Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there’s pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows…
Tool Command Language. It’s a shitty stringly-typed scripting language from the 80s that took a neat hack (function bodies are string literals) way too far.
It’s a bit less shit than Bash, but shitter than Perl.
Unfortunately the entire EDA industry has decided to use it as their scripting interface, which isn’t too bad in itself - the commands they provide are pretty simple - but unfortunately it leads to people stupidly basing their entire EDA infrastructure on TCL rather than wrapping it in a saner language.
Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! 😱
Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there’s pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows…
The TV company?
Tool Command Language. It’s a shitty stringly-typed scripting language from the 80s that took a neat hack (function bodies are string literals) way too far.
It’s a bit less shit than Bash, but shitter than Perl.
Unfortunately the entire EDA industry has decided to use it as their scripting interface, which isn’t too bad in itself - the commands they provide are pretty simple - but unfortunately it leads to people stupidly basing their entire EDA infrastructure on TCL rather than wrapping it in a saner language.
Thanks, I hate it even more