Highly regarded Sun Microsystems computer scientist John Ousterhout, author of the TCL scripting language, has left Sun Laboratories to form a new start-up, which will concentrate on TCL (Tool Command Language) and associated tools. The new firm, Scriptics Inc, is based near Sun Labs in Palo Alto, California. When the Java language surfaced at Sun Microsystems back in 1995, Ousterhout was said to be a fan (CI No 2,676), despite the widely noticed overlap between the two languages. Attempts to position TCL as the scripting language glue for extending and connecting up components written in C, C++ and Java, as well as JavaBeans, ActiveX and Corba components, were subverted when Sun geared its marketing machine around the JavaScript scripting language from Netscape Comuunications Corp instead. Ousterhout carried on TCL development and support from within Sun Laboratories, the research arm of Sun, but with little prospect of seeing his work endorsed as a commercial product, despite an estimated worldwide developer base of around one million. He will now carry on that work from within Scriptics, but will also launch a complete development environment for TCL programmers, called TCLPro. Ousterhout says TCLPro will boost the productivity of TCL programming, make it easier to package and distribute TCL applications, and simplify the use of popular extensions. The company will also ofer training, technical support and consulting services. Ousterhout says he’s leaving with the full support and blessing of Sun management. Sun will continue to use the language internally, he said. Over the next year the core development of the language will gradually move over from Sun to Scriptics. TCL and the TK toolkit will continue to be free, though development tools won’t be. Ousterhout is joined at Scriptics by Sarah Daniels, vice president of sales and marketing and co-founder of Sunnyvale, California-based Penergy Inc, a pharmaceutical software house that raised over $10m in venture capital before being sold off as a 40 person company last Spring to Domain Corp.
