Re: [Tcl9-cloverfield] Cloverfield usability

[Andy G. <unu...@ai...>]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:12:48 +0200, Frédéric Bonnet wrote
> Tcl is a language for craftsmen, and I expect Cloverfield to 
> follow the same path (away from the toy, ad-hoc languages).

Thank you for clarifying.  This is the answer I was hoping for. :^)  I just
wanted to hear it from you.  This new language is an outreach to qualified
programmers who had trouble grokking or living with a couple surprising
consequences of Tcl's dodekalogue.  This new language is not an outreach to
people who only know how to paste together examples found in cookbooks.  The
latter audience is too frequently targeted, I think...  And that has put
pressure on the "industry" to reduce its standards. :^(

> I remember the discussion around {*}. Of course, now that it's part 
> of Tcl8.5, everybody starts to use it and thinks it's a great 
> addition, and no one would think in their right mind to go back to 
> quoting hacks with eval and list.

I hated having to use those hacks.  And since I originally learned (or thought
I learned) Tcl from analyzing a poorly written codebase, I didn't know about
how to use [list] to make [eval] safe.  I also didn't comprehend the reasons
why things sometimes broke due to space characters, etc.  So I instead tried
to make my code safe by having it explicitly disallow spaces and such.  What a
horrible approach that was...  It's basically the same deal as antivirus
software.  Instead of fixing the exploitable holes, let's disallow programs
known to take advantage of them.

(I later relearned by carefully studying the endekalogue and reading a few books.)

> But back in the days, a significant part of the community felt that it would
> deface the language.

This argument is still made.  On 2007-07-18 19:46:32, about {*}, Tom
Poindexter wrote "Wart is both a visual clue and a commentary of the
Perlification of the Tcl syntax caused by the operator."

> We miss the "it's broken so let's fix it" philosophy.

More like, "Tcl isn't broken; it's your understanding of Tcl that is broken."

> We need to be more pragmatic (but of course not too pragmatic else we'll end
> up like PHP).

Please explain what it means for PHP to be pragmatic.

-- 
Andy Goth | <unu...@ai...> | http://andy.junkdrome.org/