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As to why it faded into obscurity:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-...

The library/packaging system was a disaster - at least in the early versions.

Half the libs needed a source code change to the tcl interpreter. There were two main add ons (I want to remember one was called green eggs and ham???) which were incompatible, so if your lib needed A and another bit needed B you were stuck.

While it was a disaster, the current Tcl package implementation surpasses many other languages. It's possible to have multiple versions installed and have different runtimes choose a version they want. The biggest advantage though is binary version independence through stubs (http://wiki.tcl.tk/stubs). Compile a binary package for 8.x, it will work in 8.y where y >= x.

Yes this was back in the early 90s and I don't even remember what they were called. I don't know if it was really a deficiency of TCL that you had to patch the interpreter to enable library features or the writers were just lazy.

One thing it did have was very easy to write C plugins because everything is a string

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