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diane_a@diasp.org
𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒

History of Tcl (tcl.tk)

"The Tcl scripting language grew out of my work on design tools for integrated circuits at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1980's. My students and I had written several interactive tools for IC design, such as Magic and Crystal. Each tool needed to have a command language (in those days people tended to invoke tools by typing commands; graphical user interfaces weren't yet in widespread use). However, our primary interest was in the tools, not their command languages. Thus we didn't invest much effort in the command languages and the languages ended up being weak and quirky. Furthermore, the language for one tool couldn't be carried over to the next, so each tool ended up with a different bad command language. After a while this became rather embarrassing.

In the fall of 1987, while on sabbatical at DEC's Western Research Laboratory, I got the idea of building an embeddable command language. The idea was to spend extra effort to create a good interpreted language, and furthermore to build it as a library package that could be reused in many different applications. The language interpreter would provide a set of relatively generic facilities, such as variables, control structures, and procedures. Each application that used the language would add its own features into the language as extensions, so that the language could be used to control the application. The name Tcl (Tool Command Language) derived from this intended usage."

https://www.tcl.tk/about/history.html

#opensource #programming #gui #unix #linux

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dredmorbius@diaspora.glasswings.com
Doc Morbius

Life on the Command Line (2011)

A few weeks ago, I realized that I no longer use graphical applications.

That’s right. I don’t do anything with gui apps anymore, except surf the Web. And what’s interesting about that, is that I rarely use cloudy, ajaxy replacements for desktop applications. Just about everything I do, I do exclusively on the command line. And I do what everyone else does: manage email, write things, listen to music, manage my todo list, keep track of my schedule, and chat with people. I also do a few things that most people don’t do: including write software, analyze data, and keep track of students and their grades. But whatever the case, I do all of it on the lowly command line. I literally go for months without opening a single graphical desktop application. In fact, I don’t — strictly speaking — have a desktop on my computer. ...

-- Stephen Ramsay

For my own uses, whilst I heavily use Android tablets, my preference is a full Linux desktop or laptop. On Android the single most useful application I have, and The One Thing Which Does Not Precisely Suck, is Termux, a Linux userland environment with nearly 2,000 installable Free Software packages.

I'd make heavier use of console-based web clients (w3m) if less of the Web wasn't broken using one. I'm ... begining to explore Gemini.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30389399

https://web.archive.org/web/20170826033741/http://stephenramsay.us/2011/04/09/life-on-the-command-line

#CommandLine #Productivity #UI #UX #Linux #GUI #StephenRamsay

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