From the "Well, no big surprise, really," department, Dr. John Ousterhout has announced that he'll be retiring from the TCL core team. Ousterhout created the language way back in 1988. Earlier this year, I wrote about the 20th anniversary of the language. I got to speak with Dr. Ousterhout for that piece, and I have to say he's a wise and courtious fellow. He was a bit shocked that I was asking him about the language, however. He also didn't realize it had been 20 years already.

As Dr. Ousterhout said in the Google Group thread, he hasn't really been contributing to Tcl in the last five years, having moved on to a corporate job where he gets to think and strategize more than program. Still, it is sad to see him wandering off into the sunset.

I think the best story Dr. Ousterhout told me during that interview was about these things called browsers, which he was first alerted to in the early 90's. From the interview:

“In 1991 or so, there was a message that appeared on the Tcl newsgroup from a guy saying he heard about this cool thing called the World Wide Web. He thought it was really cool, but there were no graphical tools for it. He asked if anyone was willing to work with him to make a graphical front end for the World Wide Web. If we'd done that we would have been out there before Mosaic. Unfortunately, I looked at it like it was the craziest thing I'd ever seen in my life. I thought it was not going anywhere.”

Hats off to Dr. Ousterhout for all his work. Even though Tcl didn't take over the world, it's still an important language, and it will live on long after he's left the core team.