How can I make up my mind with so much radically-different cool stuff about?
Jeff: Tux Racer, just because it's darn fun.
What has surprised you most about working with tclcore?
Donal: I really don't know; it's been something of a learning experience.
Jeff: Nothing surprises me ... :P
What is your Vision for the future?
Mark: I think Tcl will continue to be a useful embedded language.
My philosophy is to find a language designed and implemented by super smart guys and use it.
Donal: Too busy to have visions right now. :^/ However, I would like to get to a state where OO in Tcl is a trivial derivation of existing core facilities. I think we're nearly there, but not quite.
Jeff: Now, I may live in BC, but that doesn't mean I have visions ...
For the near term, I plan to work on projects surrounding Tcl, and I have so much on my plate that the visions are all one on top of the other just confusing the picture.
I would like to take the time, once again, to publically thank Andreas, Donal, Jeff and Mark for participating in this interview!
As this interview was in the final stages of being written up, Tcl and Tk 8.4.2 were released: http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.4.html !
About the Interviewer:
David Welton lives
and works in the California Bay Area as a consultant with Linux,
Apache, Tcl, Python and other Free Software tools. He is a
member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a Debian package
maintainer.
About the Interviewees:
Donal K. Fellows
Donal is currently working on resource discovery and brokering on
the global Grid. Prior to joining John Brooke's group at
Manchester Computing in 2002, Donal worked on various projects at
the Department of Computer Science in the University of
Manchester. Much of his work there was on developing software for
doing design and analysis of asynchronous hardware (including the
design and development of a network-enabled analysis engine, and a
major part of a large scale parallel model checker) though, as his
interests are in the production of elegant interfaces to computing
systems, he also worked on producing GUIs for software waveform
viewers and network-enabled examination-taking systems. Donal is
also a member of the Tcl Core Team, a core developer of Tcl/Tk and
editor of the TIP document series (the standardization process for
the Tcl language).
Home Page: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/
Mark Harrison
Mark Harrison works on distributed computing at Pixar Animation
Studios. Prior to this he was Chief Software Architect at AsiaInfo
Holdings, where he designed mission-critical software for the
China Internet Backbone. He has been programming in Tcl since 1991
and is co-author of "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" and "Tcl/Tk
Tools".
Home Page: http://www.markharrison.net/
Jeff Hobbs
Jeff is the Core Release Manager for the Tcl language. He has
maintained the TK Usage FAQ since 1996 and is a program committee
member for the USENIX Tcl/Tk Conference. Jeff comes to ActiveState
from Scriptics, where he was a Tcl Ambassador, responsible for
communications liaison between Scriptics and the Tcl community and
managing development of the Tcl core. Previously Jeff was also a
software engineer at both Siemens AG and CADIX International. At
ActiveState, Jeff is the tech lead for Tcl technologies.
Jeff is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society and USENIX. He holds a B.A. in Computer and Information Sciences and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.
Andreas Kupries
Andreas is a member of the Tcl Core Team, and has been employed by
ActiveState since early 2001 to work on Tcl, development tools,
and the standard Tcl library, tcllib. He has been involved with
Tcl development since the Tcl 7 days, and is credited with several
innovative Tcl extensions, such as Trf, Memchan, and a number of
tcllib packages. Andreas has a degree in Computer Science from
the Northrhine Westphalia Technical University at Aachen.
Home Page: http://www.oche.de/~akupries/welcome.html
About TCL/TK:
More information about Tcl and the Tk toolkit can be found at http://www.tcl.tk/ . Other useful Tcl resources include the Tcl'ers Wiki, at http://wiki.tcl.tk/ and the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, which is a very friendly place to ask questions and get answers from Tcl experts, including the core developers.
