A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout
I remember my freshman year of college in 1994 when I took C++ and asked the professor about how to write a GUI program.  She told us about the Motif toolkit.  I got a book from the library and typed in a hundred lines of boiler plate code just to make "Hello World" in Motif and C.<p>It then took about 5 minutes to compile on a DECstation 5000 with 32MB RAM running Ultrix.<p>Someone in the computer lab saw me with the Motif toolkit book and said "Why don't you use Tcl / Tk?"  I said "What's that?" and they showed me.  I had "Hello World" in 3 lines and could edit and start my new version in a couple of seconds instead of minutes to compile.<p>After I graduated I got a job in the semiconductor industry which ran on Solaris and HP-UX and now Linux.  All our digital tools from Cadence and Synopsys started using Tcl as the built in scripting language.  I ended up teaching my older coworkers how to program in Tcl.  I was still writing Tcl yesterday.  There are a lot of things I hate about it but it has stuck around.<p>The text before the interview mentions AFS which I did not think Ousterhout had anything to do with.  I thought it was from Carnegie Mellon and then IBM Transarc.  We used AFS at my school and I still miss it.  Going to NFS in the industry seemed like a step backward.<p>We only had an 8MB quota for our entire Unix account in college.  It was great when working on a group project that I could make a dir in my account for that project and then add the 3 other classmates login id's to the group dir ACL list.<p>These days at work depending on the size of the company we have to send an email to the sysadmin / devops team to say "Add user ABC to project group ID XYZ" and then wait hours or days.   At my current job we can request Unix group access through a web site but I still think it is some human running commands to manually add users because it takes about 24 hours.