Cameron Laird's personal notes on why one uses Tcl

My qualification of Tcl is: "freedom to mix and match". The value is the ability to tear apart one approach and glue it back together in another way - later, when technology or requirements change. The genius of John Ousterhout and his invention of Tcl, is the acknowledgement that: 1) glue is perfect, and 2) glue is not everything.

Please give me short explanation what is so powerful in this language, what are its major advantages and where it is commonly used.

• Power: While Tcl's syntax is simple to to the point of degeneracy, it's surprisingly effective. Tcl's crucial advantage is that it's designed to play nicely with other facilities; it extends and embeds easily, communicates with other technologies, and so on. Also, Tcl leverages the code-data duality cleverly.
• Advantages: the page I launched, nominally comparing Tcl to Perl, in fact applies more broadly. Tcl is special because it's simple, it socializes, its event-handling scales well, it knows Unicode, its APIs for networking and process management are particularly elegant, and it's remarkably portable.
• Who uses Tcl? All kinds of people: academics, children, enterprises, and everyone in-between. Tcl is more like a technology than a solution to an end-user problem domain; think of how ball bearings can show up in anything. It's apt enough to be one of the principle languages for solutions developed by our company, Phaseit, Inc.. [CL will document the range of Tcl uses, eventually.]

Testimonials collected by Sun

Team Perl proclaims the superiority of their favorite. I reply, after a fashion.

AOL answers the question.

I've collected comparisons of Tcl to other "scripting" languages.

[Explain roles of Expect and Tk.]