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gricardo99 | 11 months ago

My favorite Tcl story is a little side note about how Tcl could have been the language of the web[1]

  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.
Too humble Dr. Ousterhout! It would have been a far better language.

1 - https://pldb.io/blog/JohnOusterhout.html

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neilv|11 months ago

I was leading a Tcl project around then, and, though there were some very neat things about the unusual Tcl evaluation model, I wasn't a fan of using it for nontrival work. For example, it wasn't a natural fit for working with graph structures like I had to, and like you might want for browser DOM.

(That said, Tcl would've been much better than JS, and I suspect that Ousterhout would've figured out some smart things to make it good for the browser.)

Maybe 5 years later, I was meeting with Tim-Berners Lee, and I kinda pitched Scheme to him, without planning to, but he was very interested when he asked what I'd been working on.

But then he went and did a conference keynote, in which he promoted Python as the language for ordinary people doing Web stuff. And I think he referenced one of the things I'd written in support of Scheme... as an anti-requirement for his populist vision for the Web. :)

(I wish I could've been involved in that, because I could've made a case for a populist spin on Scheme at the time.)

no_wizard|11 months ago

Why does JavaScript get some much hate?

TCL has an extremely loose runtime model, not to mention everything in the language is basically a string and all that entails.

I’ve been using JavaScript since the early 2000s, just before ES5 dropped.

Like all languages it has its curveballs but it really isn’t all that bad. It simply has oddities due to the quirky nature of the niche it was designed to fill (namely, to be a scripting language that was forgiving to web designers)

shanemhansen|11 months ago

I think Tcl as it was back then especially would have been a terrible DOM manipulation choice. I love the language but the hacks frameworks like openacs used to use to imitate basic stuff like a list of database records are among the ugliest upvar/up level hacks I've seen.

But that being said it's an incredibly adaptable language and I have zero doubt it could have been adapted to make DOM manipulation ergonomic.

shanemhansen|11 months ago

If I remember correctly early HTML specs actually used Tcl as an example for script tag content.

It was definitely possible that Tcl could have ended up the web sripting language.

hresvelgr|11 months ago

> It would have been a far better language.

I like Tcl and I think it has some very admirable traits. That being said, I don't even want to picture the hellscape of an ecosystem that would have flourished if it became the language of the web. JS was the better timeline I will admit begrudgingly, and that includes the Scheme timeline as well.

tempodox|11 months ago

Does Tcl have lexical scoping yet? If not, I'd have to disagree that it would have been a better language. JS is not one of the better languages I know, but it does have lambdas and lexical scoping. And as bad as JS's type system may be, at least it's not stringly-typed.

buescher|11 months ago

In that world, Netscape might have also acquired Naviserver instead of AOL. Wasn't the plan at Netscape to make money on their server software?