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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

The only reason to use it today is because you're forced to by the EDA industry. Otherwise there are far far better options.

That also means this release is basically irrelevant for the next 10 years because that's about how long it takes the EDA vendors to update their bundled TCL versions.

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It's unfortunate that people who dont "get" Tcl feel forced to use it because they are in EDA.

I used to have the opposite problem. My employer would not allow me to write anything mission-critical in Tcl because they thought other people would not be able to maintain it. But now that I'm retired I can write as much Tcl as I like, which is quite a lot :-)

From the (little) I've seen of that world, I'm not sure the EDA vendors understand Tcl very well either; I wouldn't want to work with scripts for Cadence's schematic capture tool, and that's not because of Tcl, it's because their scripting interface is a disaster. (Exposing C++ iterators at the script level, for example.)

Ironically the schematic capture scripts were likely written in SKILL (LISP-like language) and not TCL.

SKILL is much better than TCL for data processing. TCL's strength is in command control flow.

I "get" TCL - it's a neat hack. Arguably even an elegant hack. I can see how it would be fun to play with, in the same way that BASIC was.

But most of my work isn't playing and I don't want it to be built on hacks.

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