Re: Obstacles for Tcl/Tk commercial application development ?

Darren New <dnew@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

[snip]

That too. It would be cool to find a language that's both popular
enough to have decent libraries *and* powerful enough to have both
good static assurances and flexibility for under-specified systems.

It is easy to design a language that have decent libraries since the
beginning: just make it interoperable with C/C++.

It is possible to make powerful them enough wrt static assurances.

The flexibility part is more tricky.

My pet programming language does the three points above, IMHO very well,
and I'm convinced that it is possible to fix the parts that would
generate strong (and possibly justified) criticism. So I think that what
you describe is possible, and maybe it was already achieved by some of
the languages out there.

However, as time demonstrates, it is not technical excellence, nor even
plain convenience, what dictates the success of technology. Sun invented
Java, an inferior language for its time that, as time demonstrated, is a
technical failure and that survives thanks to plain inertia (just like
C++). Then came Microsoft with C#, a re-branded Java with some added
syntactic sugar, and again attracts hordes of programmers that either
will switch to the new fashion ten years from now or that will make
their career as maintainers of the monsters they are creating now. Let's
not talk of Visual Basic or PHP. Tcl, Perl, Python and Ruby are the
principal outsiders and owes their fame to the mediocrity of a
competition that is less productive than grown-up system maintenance
tools. Meanwhile, lots of good ideas fade on the labs of universities
and brilliant languages with great implementations are ignored because
most programmers are comfortable enough punching keyboards from 9 to 5
:-)

--
Oscar
.

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