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From: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Re: Why you should not use Tcl
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To: Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk>
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Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 18:44:40 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.dylan:2779 comp.lang.scheme:9996 comp.lang.misc:17876 gnu.misc.discuss:18399 comp.lang.tcl:19434

On Tue, 27 Sep 1994, Jeff Dalton wrote:

> > In article <366krq$c91@shore.shore.net>, Robert Withrow <witr@rwwa.com> wrote:

First of all, *I* wrote the paragraph you quoted, not Robert Withrow... 

> > Scheme, on the other hand, has lots of implementations - free and
> > commercial, and there has been a lot of research and progress on 
> > better implementation. However - scheme has been around quite a 
> > while ( +++ They've had time to discover and try to tackle some of the
> > problems that tcl folk are just starting to bump into. ) and ( --- )
> > it drags a lot of baggage with it that someone starting from scratch
> > would probably drop. 
> > 
> > Dylan is an example of trying to do an object oriented scheme-like 
> > language with the freedom to start over from scratch. 
> 
> Are you serious?  Scheme has a lot of baggage while Dylan is
> free of it?  What are you thinking of?  Exact/inexact numbers?
> Call/cc?  Parenthesised syntax?
> 
> -- jd
> 

And second - you must have read the text of then article with as much 
care as you took in getting the attribution correct, if that's what 
you *think* I said. Right after this sentence you quoted above:

> > Dylan is an example of trying to do an object oriented scheme-like 
> > language with the freedom to start over from scratch. 

came this, which you left off:

| ... Also, (IMHO) I'm not sure that
| Dylan has "got it right". Dylan may be trying to do too much and be 
| all things to all programmers. 
|
| [ See Richard Gabriels paper on " ... how to win big ... " for an 
|  alternative view of "the next lisp" ] 

 I clearly did NOT say Dylan was "free of baggage" - I said that was 
one of it's design goals, and that I have some doubts whether that have 
succeeded. And I recommended Gabriel's paper - where he discusses WHY
Lisp ( generically speaking to include scheme ) has not been commercially
successful, and whether it's not too late to start over with the "next"
Lisp and "do it right". I agree with Gabriel (*) that what's required is 
something that is both smaller AND bigger than scheme. 
 
John Ousterhout, in his post in this thread 
 (Message-ID: <367307$1un@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM>) wrote:
 
| Language designers love to argue about why this language or that language
| *must* be better or worse a priori, but none of these arguments really
| matter a lot.  Ultimately all language issues get settled when users 
| vote with their feet.  If Tcl makes people more productive then they will 
| use it;  when some other language comes along that is better (or if it 
| is here already), then people will switch to that language.  This is The
| Law, and it is good.  The Law says to me that Scheme (or any other Lisp
| dialect) is probably not the "right" language:  too many people have
| voted with their feet over the last 30 years.  I encourage all Tcl
| dis-believers to produce the "right" language(s), make them publically
| available, and let them be judged according to The Law.


Although, I *don't* believe that the market is the only measure of 
"rightness" - it's been wrong before, and it'll be wrong again - 
I do think he makes a valid point. People use what works: I use 
xlisp-stat and S because they contain a lot of statistical functions,
which, while perhaps intellectually trivial to port to scheme ( or 
another language ) would take a lot of time and effort for little
gain. I occasionally use Perl, even though, aesthetically, I have 
a strong dislike for the language - but it *IS* useful. ( I don't 
have anything particularly nasty to say about Python, but Guido van Rossum
has often accused me of "trying to turn Python into Scheme" ! ) 


Scheme is probably the least deficient of all of the languages discussed,
but it has often been burdened by a user community that considers any
suggestion that it's not already perfect as heresy. 

Some of the same attitude has been displayed in this thread by the tcl 
"defenders of the faith. ( but, noticably, not John Ousterhout, himself. )

[ And I hope I'm wrong in my pessimism about Dylan. - or am I supposed to 
  call it "stupid, butt-faced, folksinging computer language" now ? :-) ]


(*) "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" by Richard P. Gabriel 
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/
		lisp/txt/gabriel/0.html>


-- Steve Majewski       (804-982-0831)      <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU> --
-- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics --
-- Box 449 Health Science Center        Charlottesville,VA 22908 --
		 [ "Cheese is more macho?" ] 






