Paul Graham on great hackers

Paul Graham on great hackers

Tcl is far from dead, but it has an image problem. The technology is very, very solid stuff (large portions of the Tcl core are very nicely written C code) with a great idea behind it (a small repurposeable and extremely flexible scripting language). The problem is that there are negative perceptions about it in the open source world, and as a consequence, it has little "buzz". While this in and of itself doesn't matter, what matters a great deal is attracting new blood and people with innovative ideas to your platform, because of the network effects.

Image problems also matter to those who sell services based on something. It's pretty easy to find work doing Java (even if, as Mr. Graham puts so well, it's crappy work), but much harder to find Tcl jobs, or even sell products based on it. Word on the street is that you too have caught flack from customers who would prefer to see BitKeeper's GUI in Java instead of Tk, even though Java is no more native looking than Tk (as opposed to something like wxWindows).