Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 12:52:48 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD-current users) Cc: wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de, alk@Think.COM (Tony Kimball) Subject: Re: tcl -- what's going on here. Message-ID: <199606231052.MAA04019@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199606222113.QAA02156@compound.Think.COM> from Tony Kimball at "Jun 22, 96 04:13:04 pm"
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As Tony Kimball wrote: > up-to-date version, and is just plain evil. I suggested that I would > be willing to rewrite those few perl kludges which are current. I was > rebuffed. They are not ``kludges''. The authors of those tools deliberately choose Perl for them, not since they didn't knew C, but since they felt that Perl was simply more adequate. Something like text processing (or pattern matching etc.) in C is simply a kludge, where Perl allows for elegant (and easier to maintain) solutions. Likewise for Tcl with its intended target (e.g. the new install tool). After starting to read Ousterhout, i think Tcl is something like ``The FORTH of the 90's''. Your embedded controllers don't need man pages, nor do they need adduser etc. So nobody prevents you from removing Perl there. But please, don't burden _us_ with a higher maintenance load a C kludge would cause just for the reason that _your_ embedded controller might be bloated. We do not prevent you from using BSD in an embedded controller environment (and actually, we are certainly also proud of people who do these things), but you should not expect us to tweak our policy just to fit the needs for this rather special target market. Btw., your offer to _rewrite_ something fails to cope with the fact that it's usually much less effort to write something, compared to _maintaining_ it over its expected lifetime. For a good example of what happens with unmaintained software, see the `ft' driver. Most of us enjoy writing new stuff, but only the diehards pick the burden to maintain old and crufty code. You won't see my name bright in front of many projects or modules in our code base, but if you browse the commitlogs, you will notice that it appears in numerous bugfixes throughout the system. It's basically a thankless job, i can tell you, but people doing this are desperately needed. (There are many good examples of these people, like Mike Pritchard's walk through zillions of man pages.) Everything that makes our lives easier is greatly welcome, like scripting languages in situations where C sucks, and sh/sed/awk would only obfuscate the solution. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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