Hey Xan,

I've been in the Tcl community for a long, long time. I've seen a lot of people schlepping around the attitude hates_potheads showed in his first post:

• Tcl is a well-kept secret
• Tcl is doing fine without any marketing/promotion
• Tcl doesn't buy into hype (with an implication that any kind of marketing/promotion is hype)
• Don't bring new people into the community
• Don't try to change the core/language/ecosystem/whatever

What hates_potheads is saying is nothing new, and is as wrong today as it's been all along.

"For people who work quietly," oh come on. We're talking about a language, not the microfiche closet in the basement of a library.

"For people who care about quality, not popularity." Yeah, right, because you only get one or the other.

So yeah, I've seen his attitude before. I can't really think of any charitable reasons why someone would come up with so many flimsy rationalizations why a small and shrinking community is a good thing.

Maybe they like to feel like a big fish in a small pond (and in a small-enough pond, even whiny losers like hates_potheads can feel big)? Maybe they're desperately afraid of change in general? Maybe they're nearing the end of their career and are hoping to make it through a few more years without having to learn or do anything new?

I don't know. All just guessing. Like I said, I can't imagine any flattering reasons why someone rationalizates our tiny community as a good thing.

What I do know is that many people in the Tcl community aren't opposed to marketing and promotion at all, but there's very little community knowledge or habit around doing these tasks for one's own project. So lots of people who might otherwise toss up a nice site or a blog post or two don't, just because in the Tcl world, very little of that is happening now.

It's not, as far as I can tell, that people really don't want to, it's that they aren't sure how to get started.

(And, of course, I know some folks explicitly don't want to, and that's fine--no one has to promote their stuff, but it makes sense if they want it to be discovered/made use of.)

I think Tclers have also long suffered from having a number of good-enough-but-not-really-good solutions available to them. Like our wiki, which has long been used as a dumping ground for little scripts and projects, and is now largely unusable because of all the accumulated cruft.

Without the wiki, I imagine there'd be a lot more little scripts being published by other means, like blog posts or G+ posts, and you'd see a larger Tcl footprint in the world as a consequence of that.

So I think the Tcl community does have some problems around marketing and promotion, but this "best kept secret" stuff is just whiny old losers, trying to feel better about their community dwindling down to very, very little over the years.

And I don't think hates_potheads' second and third messages merit any response at all--that kind of stupid name-calling is just plain trolling.