I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.

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moregrist 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine.

But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.

Fun, painful times.

The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.

	▲	IshKebab 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tcl is still entirely stringly typed. That's never changed. There are under-the-hood optimisations to make it less insanely slow but that only affects performance. Tcl is a cool hack (the interpret is simple to write) but it's insane to actually use it. I wish the EDA industry would realise that.