“I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl”[1] (last posted here[2] in 2020) also makes some good points that are not in other writeups, specifially regarding interactive use.
I think Tcl(’s standard library) is still too wordy to make a comfortable interactive shell, but it’s still leagues above everything else I’ve seen; in particular, I can’t help but think Shivers’s dismissal of interactive use in his description of Scsh is something of a cop-out—there are (now, maybe not then) plenty of nice languages to hack a prototype or a quick script in, but somehow Bourne shell + Unix utilities is still the best we can do that won’t make my fingers ache? Tcl demonstrates very well that inside sh there’s a Lisp trying to get out (and Plan 9’s rc does the same but worse), but somehow that line of thought seems to not have been continued further.
(Just in case, I see both Elvish and PowerShell as being more in the Scsh direction than the Tcl direction, that is making a “proper” language at the expense of interactive use and my fingers; Elvish appears to at least have a properness-Bourneness knob but that’s hardly a solution. Anyhow, I don’t think either contributes much to our knowledge of the virtually untouched interactive-use landscape, as opposed to the relatively well-explored scripting-language landscape.)
I’m rereading this now and I realize I was probably thinking about Oil, not Elvish, or rather that my brain mixed some of the Elvish materials I read into the Oil author’s (extensive and illuminating) blog posts and on top of that called the resulting chimera by its smaller part. I’m sorry.
I think Tcl(’s standard library) is still too wordy to make a comfortable interactive shell, but it’s still leagues above everything else I’ve seen; in particular, I can’t help but think Shivers’s dismissal of interactive use in his description of Scsh is something of a cop-out—there are (now, maybe not then) plenty of nice languages to hack a prototype or a quick script in, but somehow Bourne shell + Unix utilities is still the best we can do that won’t make my fingers ache? Tcl demonstrates very well that inside sh there’s a Lisp trying to get out (and Plan 9’s rc does the same but worse), but somehow that line of thought seems to not have been continued further.
(Just in case, I see both Elvish and PowerShell as being more in the Scsh direction than the Tcl direction, that is making a “proper” language at the expense of interactive use and my fingers; Elvish appears to at least have a properness-Bourneness knob but that’s hardly a solution. Anyhow, I don’t think either contributes much to our knowledge of the virtually untouched interactive-use landscape, as opposed to the relatively well-explored scripting-language landscape.)
[1] http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386867