I first encountered TCL embedded deep within an electronics CAD package, and without any experience in TCL, managed to figure out how to write a small proc to simply design testing by running a signal pattern test at varied periods and levels. It was about a year before I would take a second look at the language, and have found it quite to my liking since for all manner of tasks.
Unlike Perl, TCL is actually quite readable, and still retains an impressive degree of flexibility, letting me do what I need to do. I like it. :)
Programming History: I started programming back in about '86, on a trusty home PC, the Apple ][+. I was usually found writing little Applesoft BASIC programs, instead of doing my grade 5 homework (or sometimes, even in class if an idea hit me). I touched on Assembler (by poking hand-compiled binary data into memory), though without any decent reference books, didn't get very far at that stage. I migrated from there to AmigaBASIC on a wonderful machine known as the Amiga A1000 from Commodore (also touching briefly on their rather scary C64), and moving from there onto a little real Assembler programming. Later on I migrated to an Intel "IBM-compatible" 286 PC, starting off in QBASIC (again), then moving on to Borland Pascal (from versions 5 through 7), adding in embedded Assembler along with way. That led on to full Assembler programming, and back again to blending Borland Pascal UI's with fully Assembler workhorse libraries. When I hit University, Win95 was only just getting about, and I was still using Win3.11 at home. At that time, Unix was a breath of fresh air. Real multitasking, process management, and loads of other wonders. With Unix, I found C (and C++), and finally for the first time, no BASIC. University also introduced me to the wonders of several other interpreted languages (but no TCL). Since then, though I know more about Windows than I care to, and are starting to look at cross-platform programming, I've been almost purely Linux, using C or TCL. And that is where I am today.
Topics to which I've had some input:
Some bits and pieces I use personally: