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Before a rewrite in Java around 2009, MapQuest ran on AOLserver. Tcl was a bit of a surprise to me, and struck me as a very powerful dynamic language.

If AOL had open sourced it sooner it might have occupied the “A” in the LAMP stack.

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Tcl is pretty amazing, in my opinion. I have used it since 1995-ish and have always enjoyed it. I worked on code in AOLServer for a while, and it was a pretty powerful tool for dynamic page generation.

It was a bear to maintain large codebases with. AOLserver could have won had move languages been built into the server (python, perl, etc) but Tcl was so well integrated trying to bring another language to its level would have been far too much work

Back in the 2000's Dossy Shiobara kept putting out the idea that AOL Server should have a JavaScript engine. If he had made that happen we really could be living in a different world today.

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