"Several of the 'core team,' including the lead maintainer, Jeff
'The Tcl Guy' Hobbs, Andreas Kupries, Donal Fellows and Mark
Harrison, were kind enough to take some time to respond to some
questions about a variety of topics via email. We start by asking
Jeff about how the torch was passed...
"Jeff, can you tell us a little about how 'ownership' of
Tcl, passed from Dr. Ousterhout to yourself?
"Jeff: John hired me to do it. :) It actually
took three tries (third time's the charm). The first time I met him
was while he was at Sun Labs. I had been working with Tcl for a
while already, both at the Tcl user level as well as the Tcl/C
level, including extension authoring. I was visiting to show off
some research I was doing at the University of Oregon using Tcl
(related to wearable computers). I met all of the Sun Labs Tcl team
at that time. It was actually following that visit, after talking
with John and Jacob Levy, that I was inspired (with some
encouragement from them) to write the first Tcl plugin to Netscape.
It was a windowless version, but it worked. Anyway, I digress ... I
had an offer to join the Sun Tcl team after graduation but turned
it down as I wasn't so sure about moving to the Silicon Valley and
working for a large company. I received another offer as he was
forming Scriptics, but that coincided with the time that I had
received an offer from Siemens in Munich. The idea of a startup was
more appealing, but the choice between Munich and Mountain View was
... well, we know how that turned out..."
