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From: jamesl@netcom.com (James Logajan)
Subject: Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and Tcl ...)
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John Ousterhout (ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com) wrote:
: Every single programmer who ever wrote a program in Tcl, Perl, C++, Visual
: Basic, or even C could have chosen Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk.  But they
: didn't.

Others have responded to this point adequately; however, I just happen to be
working on a product that is going to require a scripting or extension
language. We get to pick our own language (for once). Our short list includes:

Lua
Python
Perl
Tcl

I have not used any of these before, so have "fresh eyes" on our team. We
need a language that is easy for beginners to pick up, that is not too
slow, handles string processing well, has a small memory footprint, and
is of course extensible. OOP support was considered important, but not
vital.

So far, Lua is winning, with Python still in the running because of its
stronger OO support. Tcl is horribly slow with no particular feature
that compensates for its sluggishness. Perl seems too syntactically unruly
for people to get a good grip on how best to compose their work but has
about the same speed as Python.

Lua is about 1/10 the size of the others (~70k versus ~1000k for all the
others on a Sparc) and is several times faster than Python and Perl. Tcl
is an order of magnitude (10, not 2!) slower than Python/Perl.

It is too bad that Lua doesn't have its own newsgroup (yet?). I was
pleasantly surprised by the small size, fast speed, simple syntax, and
powerful semantics of the language.

