Sender: monnier@tequila.systemsz.cs.yale.edu
From: Stefan Monnier <monnier+comp.lang.functional@tequila.cs.yale.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.scheme.scsh,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.tcl,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.perl.misc,comp.lang.python,comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot with latest paper
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Date: 09 Apr 1997 20:00:57 -0400
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ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com (John Ousterhout) writes:
> But I stand by the two main points in the paper, which are that (a) OO
> programming hasn't increased productivity dramatically because it doesn't

Now, I don't understand one thing: why is OO evil if its only problem is that
it doesn't increase productivity ? As far as I can see, OO doesn't have too
many nasty side-effects.

Once you have admittedl that what you meant by "strongly typed" was actually
"statically typed" and that Tcl is more or less "dynamically typed", the
question comes down as: what is the advantage of Tcl over other dynamically
typed languages ? I can see reasons to use a dynamically typed language (for
scripting among other things), but why insist on a string-based system ?

String based systems have several problems that you have to recognize such
as performance (Tcl is well known for its lame speed and to overcome it,
Tcl-8.0 has to partly drop the "everything's a string" principle) and support
for data-structures. Now you'll say "if you need data-structures, go to C", but
why ? Why couldn't my scripting language support data-structures nicely ?

I didn't need hand-assembly performance for my "approximate email matching"
in Exmh's interface to PGP, and since Exmh is a tcl-only program, including C
code in the distribution would have been a huge pain, so I coded the thing in
Tcl, result:
- the code is ugly
- the performance is bearable on current fast machines, whereas with the
  simplest scheme interpreter (which only offers lists but no proper
  structures), it would have been instantaneous even on a lowly 286 (or 68K)


        Stefan

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-- strings are the MS-DOS of data-structures --
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