[aclug-L] Re: TCL vs PERL

["James G." <jamesga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What I saw at the "Perl" TCL vs Perl advocacy page  was two articles making a
comparison that were written  3 to 4 years ago. Two (lack of) features about
TCL that were pointed out were added to TCL as of August 1997 (TCL Version
8.0).  TCL is now up to version 8.4.

The added feature to TCL V8.0 are:
1. On-the-fly byte code compiler that improves performance of scripts from 2
to 20 times.
2. Support of binary data (read binary data into TCL variables).

So the Perl comparison of the two is pretty  old and obsolete.

I also noted that the Perl site is hosted by O'Reilly & Associates. This could
possibly explain why O'Reilly does not dominate the TCL/TK book tittles at the
book stores (Prentice Hall does).

TCL was designed by John Ousterhout of the University of California, Berkeley,
in 1988.
He later moved to Sun Microsystems. Then in The Mid 90's, spun off into a new
company called Scriptics (now Ajuba Solutions). They do B2B stuff using TCL
based web tools.
(AOL, by the way, uses TCL as their web scripting language).

It seems to me that O'Reilly (Perl) and Ajuba (TCL) being two "for profit"
companies, may be competing with each other.

So....  take a look inside the latest issue of Linux Journal (July 2000).
There are a couple of featured scientific applications that use TCL (screen
shots included).

As a Linux  user (3 years) who hasn't messed with any programming language
since using AREXX on the Amiga (in 1993), I was looking for a nice easy
scripting language to play around with. It seems to me that TCL would make a
nice choice.  That's all. No flames requested, please.

P.S. Check out:     www.rebol.com      It's a NEW scripting language... may
try it someday.

James G.

Tom Hull wrote:

> Jeff wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, James G. wrote:
> >
> > > If John would like a target to aim the flame throwers at, here
> > > it is: http://dev.scriptics.com/advocacy/perl.html
> >
> > I'm not sure whether to respond to this article or not, because
> > it's not clear to me if the article is supposed to be taken
> > seriously or not.
>
> Well, it reads serious. Scriptics is a company set up to commercially
> exploit TCL, and people do tend to get serious when money is concerned.
> O'Reilly has a similar interest in Perl -- although O'Reilly is more
> diversified.
>
> One interesting thing about the article is how many of the talking
> points are new to TCL 8.0/1. Part of this seems to be aimed at
> consciously competing with Perl, but the Java experience also looms
> large. (Ousterholt was as Sun when Java was unveiled as Sun's answer
> to everything, so he had to pump out some spin to show how TCL helped
> the Java strategy.)
>
> There are similar articles in Perl camps, especially from Tom Christiansen:
>
>   http://www.perl.com/pub/language/versus/
>
> A big problem with all of these is that you tend to compare your latest/
> greatest against the last version of the competitors' offering that you
> bothered to sort of look at. (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at TCL 8, and
> don't fully grok the Perl 5 changes, and have never done anything with
> Python; I wrote Ftwalk, which IMHO is a better language than any of these,
> but as far as I can tell has no other users in the universe.)


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