Tcl, or the “Tool Command Language“, created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit — Tk. In 1997 Ousterhout was awarded the ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk, an award given to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems with a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both.
↫ Armen Barsegyan
Everything you could ever possibly want to know about Tcl/Tk. There’s nothing to add here; if this is up your alley – and you know if it is – just go ahead and read it, and stop wasting time here.
He did remark on C# CLR high RAM overhead but didn’t bother to use Native AOT compilation.
Maybe it wasn’t convenient for his comparision to one of the greatest products of the human mind.
C# isn’t really cross-platform.
Back in the day what I didn’t like is that there were language extensions (modules?) that were compiled as different interpreters, you couldn’t download them an install to use with the official interpreter. So you couldn’t use expectcl/expectk, the automation tool together with itcl/itk that added object orientation or the extended widgets whose name I don’t remember.
I’m not a developer but I know just enough about programming to dabble with little stuff, and way back in the early 2000s I used Tcl/Tk to make a couple of small utilities for my Slackware desktop. I don’t even remember now what they did or why I needed them — actually, I do recall that one was for an amateur radio project I was working on — but I clearly recall studying and learning Tcl/Tk to make it work and it worked fine for my purposes at the time, though it wasn’t pretty. Tcl/Tk was fairly simple to learn and get off the ground, and I’m sure I didn’t even scratch the surface of what it’s capable of.
I probably couldn’t do it now if I needed to, my brain was much more elastic and geared towards learning then, as I had just finished college.
Tcl tends to be dismissed as merely a simple scripting language, but its programming model turned out to be very powerful. It’s basically LISP without the parentheses: It makes exceptionally easy to treat code as data. Scripts can be assembled, transformed, passed around, and evaluated, while new commands can introduce vocabulary and behavior specific to a problem domain. You can build a useful DSL in Tcl remarkably quickly; its substitution and evaluation rules extract enormous expressive power from a very small syntactic core.
The basic language can be learned in a couple of afternoons, and it is very extensible. It has a rich ecosystem for GUIs, automation, testing, networking, databases, embedded scripting, and tool control.
Tcl is also insanely portable and stable. We still have ancient Tcl scripts in production that survived multiple platform migrations as well as several generations of the EDA tools we use them with. They continue to work with almost no maintenance. Tcl automatically compiles scripts to bytecode internally, and performance critical stuff can even be moved into native extensions if necessary.
I genuinely wish it were taught more often. Tcl is an excellent introductory language for understanding interpreters, substitution, metaprogramming, DSL construction, and language extensibility. Alas, Python appears determined to take over the entire world for better or worse. LOL.