When comparing Elixir vs Tcl, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Elixir is ranked 9th while Tcl is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great for concurrency
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Pro Great getting started tutorials
The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly.
Pro Powerful metaprogramming
Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself.
Pro Full access to Erlang functions
You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html
Pro Scalability
Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers.
More details can be found here.
Pro Great as a first functional programming language!
Pro Great documentation
Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal.
Pro Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP
All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love.
Pro Easy to download libraries
Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get
Pro Standard library
Unlike *sh Tcl has a rich standard library.
Pro Sane quoting rules
Unlike in sh you don't need to quote your variable substitutions ('"$1"').
Expanding of arguments occurs mostly explicit and if yet expected in-place (e. g. using eval
or subst
) it follows strict and well clear rules.
So exec test $argv
would execute test with single argument.
And appending {*} before $argv
would execute test with all arguments (list expansion).
Pro Cross-platform
With a little care you can have the same script work on Linux, *BSD, OS X and Windows.
Pro Widely available
You can expect a reasonably recent version of Tcl to either installed or available in the repositories of any popular open source *nix.
Pro Everything is a string
Tcl can operate at the same level of abstraction as the POSIX shell, which makes it easier to manipulate the output of other programs.
Pro Tk and Expect
Pro Standalone packages
Tcl enables easy deployment through self-contained binaries known as starpacks.
Pro Rich scripting capabilities on a single line
Want to run something 5 times? Here you go: set i 0; time { puts done-[incr i] } 5
If you need real conditional cycle? Not a problem: for {set ready 0; set i 1} {$i <= 100 && !$ready} {incr i} { if {[exec do-some-thing] eq "ready" } {set ready 1} }
Want to measure performance of something or repeat it max 300 times and not longer than 1 seconds? Very simple: timerate { after 20 } 1000 300
How about notifying yourself when some http-server is back online? Sure thing: while {[catch { close [socket localhost 80] }]} { after 1000 }; puts "\7\7\7ONLINE!"
And you can do it also fully asynchronously using events etc.
Cons
Con Deployment is still not as easy as it should be
Con Some design choices may seem strange
Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird:
Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end
or
receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end