2006-11-16

The side-effects of being a good member of the open source community

I did the Tcl examples for my personal language learning project and I noticed that some standard Tcl commands were not being highlighted in Vim (like 'lset' common which is the command to set a value in a specific index in a list). I emailed the syntax maintainer for Tcl with my changes. But he retired last summer.

So I emailed Bram Moolenaar with the changes. Well, I guess since no one has contributed the file in a while he has currently made me the maintainer of the file. =) This is rather funny since I don't code in Tcl ever. The only reason I did the little bit of coding for Tcl this time was to prove to myself I knew the language.

I have subsequently warned Bram that I normally don't code in Tcl, so I will see if he keeps me as the maintainer. But I am actually fine with staying the maintainer of the file as it is the least I owe Bram and the Vim community. And if he keeps me as the maintainer I will probably write a Tcl file much like the Python script I wrote to auto-generate the file as much as possible so it is easy to maintain. That would mean learning more Tcl. =)