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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I have always been dubious of the claim that Tcl continues to be used in "behind the scenes" applications today. For a long time it was just (for me, anyways) That Thing You Have To Learn To Script Your Eggdrop Bot but it's a neat albeit quirky little language and evidently is used in at least this project!

Kudos!

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TCL is quasi-religious. You either appreciate the simplicity and elegance of the 12 clearly ordered rules, or you think the nutbag scruffie programmer is talking to a burning bush.

I learned TCL for adding an embedded scripting language to a company's command line in 2005. I originally cast derision, but have learned to appreciate its beauty after a wrote a couple API frameworks in it. I think it has a little less magic now that lambdas and other shorthand notations are commonplace.

Another anecdote: the MacPorts package definition files [1] are actually TCL programs. MacPorts itself is built on TCL [2]

[1] Example portfile: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/master/shell...

[2] Macports source: https://github.com/macports/macports-base/tree/release-2.7/s...

It's still highly used in the EDA industry - almost every EDA tool is scriptable with Tcl. There are even IEEE formats that are actually Tcl dialects, e.g. UPF (Unified Power Format) for describing power related features of circuits.

once you recognize it, you may start to catch it in use in applications all over the place. if you ever use xilinx tools, ECAD, etc, you will see reams of tcl handling builds and project definitions

My impression was that Tcl used to be very popular for that sort of thing, but that it was supplanted by Lua, Python, and JavaScript.

What makes Tcl compelling for those applications?

that I couldn't tell you. I'd personally pick lua (or damn near anything else) first. maybe just entrenched knowledge/tooling in certain industries monster codebases.

Personally, I'd pick Tcl long before Lua... but I'd pick almost anything before Lua; which I find frustrating to work with. There's a _lot_ of personal preference and "feeling" that goes into what each person likes in a language.

Network effects. John Ousterhout invented tcl in part to script/implement the Magic VLSI layout tool. So it's not surprising it's spread to other EDA applications.

Also, Cisco IOS scripting.

This is a blast from the past. All the SCO Open Server 5 sys admin tools are tcl, both the curses and gui front ends. I haven't touched it since then. I had no strong opinion about it either way at the time.

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