Is Perl *that* good? (was: How's ruby compare to it older bro

[Roger Binns]

Roy Smith wrote:
> What Tcl lacks in power and expressiveness, it
> makes up for in simplicity of use, quick learning curve, and ease of
> embedding/extending.  I've written a lot of Tcl code, and never used
> either Expect or Tk.

That was how I originally came to Tcl.  Never used Expect either (although
some colleagues did) and never did Tk (until Tkinter!)

Tcl does have power and expressiveness.  It is one of the few languages
where you can trivially define your own control structures.  Object
orientation was added without changing the language (almost SmallTalk
like).

Tcl also had a shot at stardom.  I added it to the Mosaic browser where
it was used in a similar capacity to JavaScript today.  Details are in
the proceedings of the 2nd WWW conference.  (The audience were in awe
of a demo that printed an entire book based on following the rel links
in web page headers, got everything in the right order, loaded the pages
and printed).

To solve the same problems, Netscape invented yet another language and
put "marketing flavour of the day" in front, blessing us with Javascript.
I really wish Tcl had won that one.

Roger