This is a transcript of the text sent by Richard Stallman on Sun 25 Sep 1994 - 06:14:14 CST. The end of the flame war was on Tue, 18 Oct 1994 01:02:03 GMT.

The complete thread can be read here

Why you should not use Tcl

Richard Stallman ()
Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400

[Please redistribute wherever appropriate.]

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