Why you should not use Tcl
Richard Stallman, GNU Project
As interest builds in extensible application programs and tools, and
some programmers are tempted to use Tcl, we should not forget the
lessons learned from the first widely used extensible text
editor--Emacs.
The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should
not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming
language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs.
Because people will want to do that!
Extensions are often large, complex programs in their own right, and
the people who write them deserve the same facilities that other
programmers rely on.
The first Emacs used a string-processing language, TECO, which was
inadequate. We made it serve, but it kept getting in our way. It
made maintenance harder, and it made extensions harder to write.
Later Emacs implementations have used more powerful languages because
implementors learned from the problems of the first one.
Another lesson from Emacs is that the way to make sure an extension
facility is really flexible is to use it to write a large portion of
the ordinary released system. If you try to do that with Tcl, you
will encounter its limitations.
Tcl was not designed to be a serious programming language. It was
designed to be a "scripting language", on the assumption that a
"scripting language" need not try to be a real programming language.
So Tcl doesn't have the capabilities of one. It lacks arrays; it
lacks structures from which you can make linked lists. It fakes
having numbers, which works, but has to be slow. Tcl is ok for
writing small programs, but when you push it beyond that, it becomes
insufficient.
Tcl has a peculiar syntax that appeals to hackers because of its
simplicity. But Tcl syntax seems strange to most users. If Tcl does
become the "standard scripting language", users will curse it for
years--the way people curse Fortran, MSDOS, Unix shell syntax, and
other de facto standards they feel stuck with.
For these reasons, the GNU project is not going to use Tcl in GNU
software. Instead we want to provide two languages, similar in
semantics but with different syntaxes. One will be Lisp-like, and one
will have a more traditional algebraic syntax. Both will provide
useful data types such as structures and arrays. The former will
provide a simple syntax that hackers like; the latter will offer
non-hackers a syntax that they are more comfortable with.
Some people plan to use Tcl because they want to use Tk. Thankfully,
it is possible to use Tk without Tcl. A Scheme interpreter called STk
is already available. Please, if you want to use Tk, use it with STk,
not with Tcl. One place to get STk is from
ftp.cs.indiana.edu:pub/scheme-repository/imp/STk-2.1.tar.Z