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Tcl creator Ousterhout steps down


By Alex Handy
January 15, 2009 — 
It's been 20 years since Dr. John Ousterhout created Tcl. Since that time, the language has had its ups, downs, successes and missed opportunities. But through it all, Ousterhout has always been on the team guiding the language's future.

On Dec. 15, Tcl contributors announced on the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup that Ousterhout would be retiring from his role on the Tcl core team.

John Ousterhout

Dr. John Ousterhout created Tcl over 20 years ago. Now, he's retiring from the core team behind that language.
While newsgroup postings cited his lack of contribution to the language over the last five years as his reason for retiring from the Tcl team, Ousterhout estimated he'd been out of the loop for an even longer period. “When I created Tcl, I had no idea this is how it would be used. I haven't done any Tcl work in about seven years or so. I let go of the reigns of Tcl,” said Ousterhout.

Many other members of the team expressed regret in the newsgroup posting and wished him well. Ousterhout's day job as chairman of Electric Cloud, Inc., will now be his primary focus.

Since Ousterhout created the language, Tcl has risen and fallen alongside the environments in which it became popular. “I was just trying to solve a problem that'd been plaguing me,” said Ousterhout about creating the language. “I was working on tools like integrated circuit editors or text editors. They all needed a textual command interface. So we needed to build some kind of command language.

"We produced bad command language after bad command language. The idea for Tcl was to do it once, do it right and do it in a way that could be reused. I was originally trying to provide generic features like variables and procedures. Each application would extend Tcl with commands.”

As the language grew up, it found a home in X Windows. “I built it for that, then I realized what I'd really got here was a core of a  language that you could extend with functions,” said Ousterhout. “The X Windows system had come out. The tools for programming in it were called Motif. They were extremely difficult to program.

"We came up with an interface called Tk. This resulted in this system where it was really easy to build user interfaces. People started using Tcl in a very different way than I expected. People took Tcl and Tk together and wrapped them in a primitive application, then generated these huge Tcl scripts to produce graphical applications.”

While X Windows gave Tcl a breath of fresh air, the World Wide Web was not built upon the language. It could have been.

“If there were decisions I could take back,” said Ousterhout, “they'd be ones I made in the early 1990s. In 1991 or so, there was a message that appeared on the Tcl newsgroup about this cool thing called the World Wide Web. [The poster] thought it was really cool, but there was no graphical tool for it. [The poster asked if] anyone [was] willing to work with him to make a graphical front end for the WWW. 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.”


Related Search Term(s): Tcl


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