[Taikonerd]

I would also say -- in the late 90s, Perl's claim to fame was that it had CPAN. At the time, CPAN was revolutionary: a big, centralized repo of open-source libraries, which you could install with a single command.

Now, of course, that's a common and maybe even expected thing for a library to have: Python has Pypi, Javascript has NPM, etc.

[roryirvine]

And the whole culture around CPAN, too, with the likes of Module::Build and Test::Harness and the strong expectations around POD documents. Nothing like that existed for the other scripting languages of the time.

There was a well-trodden path from writing a hacky one-off script to deal with a specific task, to realising "hey! this might be useful for others too!" and trying to make it a bit more generic, to checking in with your local Perl Mongers for advice, to turning it into a well-tested, well-documented CPAN module.

That was the route I followed as an early-career sysadmin in the dying days of the dotcom boom - it helped me take on much more of an "engineering" mindset, and was an important foundation for my later career.

I can't have written more than a few dozen lines of Perl in the last 15 years, but do I owe that community and culture a lot.

[fithisux]

Tcl/Tk is still behind,

[doublerabbit]

9.0 has really pushed some big game changes. Sure it's a dinosaur's language from beyond times but still has it uses.

I would pick TCL over Python any day.

[__david__]

I love tcl. My absolute favorite thing about it is that `man tcl` [1] gives a dozen paragraphs that completely describe the language itself. Its simplicity always astounded me since it seems really simplistic but at some level it’s just as malleable as lisp. I wish it had caught on more (outside the hardware community which seems to have fully embraced it).

[1] https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl9.0/TclCmd/Tcl.html

[fithisux]

Tcl is magic.

Ashok's book is an excellent source of information too.