this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
445 points (98.7% liked)

Programming

19411 readers
377 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Bezier@suppo.fi 107 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Turned out better than javascript.

[โ€“] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

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...

[โ€“] resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[โ€“] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 12 hours ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)