[shawxe]

You really aren't kidding about Tcl. I recently discovered that with tclreadline, Tcl can be used completely in place of Bash in interactive mode, in a way that something like Python absolutely cannot.

A lot of people seem to have negative opinions about Tcl (maybe because it's more of a LISP than its syntax seems to imply), but as someone who is just discovering it, I'm shocked at how powerful it is for how unpopular it seems to have become. It's like some kind of unexpected cross between Bash, LISP, and (with Tk) Visual Basic. There's something about it that's just kind of fun.

[hodgesrm]

Tcl is awesome. I used it constantly in the 1990s. It's outstanding for things like testing and build scripts.

I think some of the pushback might be because people tried to use it to build large applications and failed. Languages like Java and (dare I say it) Visual Basic were more comprehensive and had good IDE support.

[mr_toad]

Tcl has features that are very powerful, but are really hard for a beginner, and really easy for a novice programmer to shoot themselves in the foot with.

Yet Tcl tends to be forced on undergraduate programmers, who probably just learn to loathe it. I lost several toes to it myself decades ago, and haven’t really felt inclined to pick it up again.