alt Hacker NewsIs Tcl having a revival? Anybody know where Tclers hang out online?
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The Wiki[1] is one of the primary "hang out" spots, although it's a bit different from usual online communication. But there's a lot of mutual commenting, small articles and utilities etc. on there.
If you work with VHDL or Verilog tools, it is very well alive and kicking. Forums about HDLs are full of it.
They did have a recent language update after awhile. That may have triggered some folks to look into it again. There is sometimes a HN effect where an initial post triggers some interest amongst enough users to get us new posts for a few weeks and then things tend to die off again. I've seen this with a lot of the more obscure languages like APL.
It would be cool to have a Tcl revival though (although I don't see it happening - I'm not in the community though so hopefully someone more informed can post). The language itself seems more capable than most give it credit for. I'm more of a Python fan myself, but can appreciate Tcl after reading through a book on it and writing a few scripts.
I last got help on the IRC channel (bridged to Slack, because I don't know IRC).
In the most recent big version update there was what I'd consider a breaking change regarding text encoding handling, but it was possible to go back to the old behaviour with an additional parameter .
It is unfortunately entrenched in the EDA industry. I have absolutely no idea why you would use it if you don't work in that space.
r/TCL is worth a mention
I worked on a startup whose main language was Tcl, between 1999 and 2002, since then I hardly touched Tcl again.
Yet it has a special place on my heart and was one of the interpreters easiest to extend, in regards to the FFI API.