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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 :-)

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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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