August 01, 2003 - Tcl's popularity is deemed low in Icon and many other places. It is often argued that the number of books on Tcl is very small. In Brazil (where I live), there only seems to be one book about Tcl, and it's one of the "pocket reference" type, by a publisher that seems to be willing to publish "pocket reference" books on just about anything computer related. A couple of geeky magazines published here discuss a lot about programming, and I only saw Tcl/Tk mentioned once in the cover, unlike other languages.
As I write this, there is a thread going on at c.l.t. about how Tk's allegedly ugly widgets put a lot of people off. That c.l.t. seems to have been caused by an article at Freshmeat about GUI toolkits, whose author expressely refused to include Tcl/Tk in the round-up because it was not even worth bothering. This thread spawned Good Looking Tk.
I recall someone once said here that Tcl seems to have caught on very well on Francophone countries (though I suspect he meant more Canada than France). And I wonder: