Item — HN Reader

It's funny to read that comment, when the argument includes:

      Tcl has a peculiar syntax that appeals 
      to hackers because of its  simplicity. 
      But Tcl syntax seems strange to most users.

That could be used to describe (emacs) Lisp too!

1 comments

There has been a time when I had to write a great number of scripts, a part of them in TCL and a similar number in Scheme.

Writing in Scheme was very straightforward and foolproof, even if sometimes it was slightly more verbose, e.g. due to extra parentheses.

On the other hand, writing in TCL had exactly the same problems as writing in some UNIX shell language, where very similarly looking programs can have subtle semantic differences that lead to very different results, due to the complex quoting rules.

Therefore it was far more difficult to avoid bugs in complicated TCL programs than in complicated Scheme programs.