Tcl/Tk 9.1

I have a soft corner for TCL, because of its idiosyncracies and weird dynamic stringy playfulness. I would be wary of using it professionally but to play around for the fun of it ... it's just too much fun. Upvar and uplevels are crazy. Python is that kind of cool one behaves when visiting parents of your would be spouse for the first time. Tcl on the other hand is like playing one's secret exclusive and somewhat dangerous games with kid school bestie. Tcl/Tk pioneered the notion of a scripting language as a library. It got threading right. You can run multiple independent Tcl interpreters in the address space of your process and they can exchange messages. Entirety of interpreter state is encapsulated inside the interpreter object, no globals. To a user an it is just a pointer to an object. No need for GIL, no need for serialization/deserialization (pickle/unpickle) ... just within process memory copy (or no copies in case data is immutable).

Tcl is certainly a bit weird and takes getting used to, but I have found it worth learning its idiosyncrasies, particularly because my applications use sqlite, which fits very naturally with Tcl. From D. Richard Hipp [1]: "SQLite is a TCL extension that has escaped into the wild. "The design of SQLite was inspired by the design of TCL, both in the way it handles datatypes and in the formatting of its source code. The index use case for SQLite was in a Tcl/Tk application for an industrial company. From its inception, SQLite has always depended heavily on TCL. These days, SQLite no longer uses TCL internally and can be run separately from any TCL interpreter, and yet the SQLite development process still depends heavily on TCL." [1] https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Pap...

The biggest early selling point of Tcl was Tk, as a relatively easy way to make good-enough GUI programs with open source on Unixen and the X Window System. Even much easier than the easier-to-use X toolkits like XView with C, and the alternatives only got more difficult from there. There were no Web frontends. Tcl itself was quite clever as what I'd actually call a string-based scripting language (contrast with Bourne/C-shell/etc. that preceded it on Unix). Originally, Tcl was among the handful of off-the-shelf extension languages. You write your big application in C or C++, and then you embed an interpreter for a higher-level extension language, for users or the original developer to add on functionality. The options at the time were usually a small Lisp/Scheme, Tcl, Python, or something entirely bespoke and probably quirky and half-butted. During early dotcoms, there was considerable interest in Tcl for backend work, and it also wouldn't have been the worst choice to put into the browser. Like Python, Tcl would've been more accessible and democratizing-the-Web than JavaScript, and there were already solid off-the-shelf designs and implementations. (Scheme would've appeared slightly more intimidating than Python or Tcl, and was more powerful, which I think was why Tim Berners-Lee preferred Python over Scheme as the people's programming language for various Web purpose. The semantics of the JavaScript we got was more a hurried toy Scheme, plus the simplest object model, and a more intimidating syntax that came from systems programming.)

Tcl/Tk has got to be the easiest GUI system out there; you can get simple stuff going with no effort - nothing I've seen comes close to that simplicity. Good to see it's getting some modern support.

Tcl is way too smart of a language for its own good. I love how everything is a string or can be hacked on a string, so you can basically do levels of metaprogramming that reach unheard of levels