From: Jeremy Henty <jeremy@...>
Date: 2005-04-03T17:34:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting Ruby approved

In article <d2n6er12qpq@enews2.newsguy.com>, Phil Tomson wrote:

> ... I've used Tcl on and off over the years and personally, I 
> would not want to do a substantial project in it.  

Having done a fair amount of Tcl programming both at home and at work,
I completely agree.  There are two reasons why I would overwhelming
prefer to do such a thing in Ruby (or even in Perl 5):

1.  Tcl doesn't have first class data structures.  I can't create an
associative array, populate it, and pass the result to another bit of
code.  I have to fake it with call-by-name and upvar.  Yeuch!

2.  Tcl doesn't have lexical scoping.  If I pass a block of code
around I have to uplevel it to run it in the right context.  Worse, I
have to uplevel it by exactly the number of stack frames between the
proc that supplies the block and the proc that executes it, which puts
a burden on refactoring.  Double Yeuch!  In Ruby this just works; it
doesn't get in the way.

That said, Tcl's embedding API design is superb.  I really hope Rite
copies it.  When I learned that the Ruby API forces a single global
interpreter instance I felt a bizarre and unfamiliar emotion:
disapointment with Ruby.

Cheers, 

Jeremy Henty