[ArkyBeagle]

This is a Usenix paper from 1990. The past is a different country...

Tcl plus the Welch book is pretty good. You get purely event driven programs. I've replaced three or four Big Piles O' Java (that didn't work) with Tcl scripts and in short amounts of time. Nothing particularly wrong with Java, but these Piles still existed...

The Welch book is the critical component...

Its nearest neighbor is Python, which is also just fine except that package management then becomes a real chore. It's also easy to forget that Scotty ( the SNMP extensions to Tcl ) was the real winner back in the first dotcom era.

It's probably pretty lousy for web caches, wan optimization and filesystems. It's very good at constructing workstation-based programs to run against embedded systems.