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Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot with latest paper

To: scsh@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot with latest paper
From: mharriso@utdallas.edu (Mark A Harrison)
Date: 7 Apr 1997 22:17:04 GMT
Organization: The University of Texas at Dallas
John Ousterhout (ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com) wrote:
:      - TCL does not scale well to large systems; it is fine for small
:     "glueing" applications, but in the "real world", such applications
:     are expected to grow with time, and soon proper typing becomes
:     necessary, more efficiency becomes necessary, etc.

: When I started on Tcl I thought this would be true, but in fact many
: people have built surprisingly large programs in Tcl.  For example,
: there is a real-time Tcl application containing several hundred thousand
: lines of code that controls a $5 billion oil well platform and (much to
: my shock) it seems to be quite maintainable.  Sybase has something like
: a million lines of Tcl code in their test suite.

I agree with John's sentiments, but would like to point out that
many (most?) of the sites with large Tcl projects use the extension
[incr Tcl] which adds an object system to Tcl.  Class-based programming
seems to scale more gracefully both in terms of program size and 
and the number of people working on a project.

Mark.

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