Rain and Language Religion

[liralen]

Today's one of those days when I'm glad that my cube opens onto windows. The sky's full of clouds of all shapes and sizes, and an overcast of pure white. No rain at the moment, but the world's damp and green.

It rained for most of the night, too, which was nice, and should help, a little, with the drought, though the farmers are all saying it's going to take a week of rain before it'll make any difference to them.

I get to discover a new language today. TCL! Woohoo. It's interpretive, and it really reminds me of the way-back days when I used to work with FORTH or even further back when I did basic as a kid by typing stuff in and then running it and having to reboot the machine when I did something wrong. My ex-boss had this argument that it's better for everyone to use one language for all their jobs, and I am now willing to say horsepucky. It's like saying it's better to use assembler, FORTRAN, COBAL, C, C++, or Perl for *all* your programming needs just so you only have to learn one language... they all do certain jobs better.

Though there will always be a programmer somewhere that swears by one and only one language. Like folks that swear by one and only one editor. Hee.

Religious debates. The Generalist against the Specialist.

I'll stay a generalist, I guess, and get TCL under my utility belt as well and I'll probably still write my utility as a set of Perl scripts and use a TCL coverplate that will do what it does best, i.e call other scripts on an interactive basis from user input.

Comments

[elthar.livejournal.com]

If you're playing with languages, allow me to comend Ruby to your attention. It's a fun language, and I expect to find plenty of day-to-day utility in it.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Oooo! Oooo!! OOP and interpreted scripting!

This is very keen.

Sadly, I'm not just playing with languages for the language's sake, TCL is supposed to be company-wide pretty soon, and my ex-boss recommended, rather strongly, that I try to do my new scripting job in TCL.

Still. I really like the informational blurbs from the link you gave, and I'll probably download it and play with it, too. I *do* have a little downtime at the moment because we're finishing off the last release and haven't *quite* started looking at what's coming down the pike for the next. From the blurbs, though, I am starting to see why it'd be a fun language to work with.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I have a strong aversion to Tcl. In the mid-90's, I worked on a very large project (50K lines of code) written almost entirely in Tcl. At first, it seemed great; it was easy to write our own object-oriented framework on top of Tcl, and its extensibility seemed nifty.

But: the Tcl at that time had no almost no compile-time checking. There was no way to find out whether a line of code was even syntactically correct unless you actually exercised that line. This was really really bad for a project that large.

Tcl may have improved since then; it has been several years. Perhaps it has more checkability now. But I would refuse to use Tcl for any large project unless it had better checkability than it did years ago.

(I'm sure you're wondering who I am. I used to hang out on alt.callahans a bit in 1990-91, and your name is familiar to me from there. Just now, I saw that you were listed as a friend of two of the folks on my friends list, bluelang and diony, and that coincidence made me interested in reading your journal.)

[liralen.livejournal.com]

That's a good thing to know about. Thanks!

I doubt we'll be doing anything that huge in it. Most of what we have is simple application control scripts, a few hundred lines, nothing in the megs... but this is a good reason to avoid doing the complex data manipulation I was doing...

Thanks!