Tcl is a "toy language" in that it's simple, children learn it, it's handy for very small programming, ...
Tcl is far more than a toy language, though, for the people who ...
applications in Tcl and Tcl/Tk
... Anyone else think that Tcl might be taken more seriously were it not for the slightly childish "tickle" name? --Andrew Cates
MSW I don't think the name is a problem at all: Consider JAVA, RUBY, PERL, PYTHON ...
(TV "Tool Command Language" strikes me as one of the more sensible names in computerworld as know, I don't see the problem. Tickle is maybe childish, maybe apt, but I've always seen TCL as simply an acronym. )
... The problem is lack of a hero, and marketing. Also, perhaps worth noting are the eternal in-community battles over lack of complex, 2-dimensional arrays, speed issues (is this still true?), and OO (lets not get into it here).
How can TCL get a public face-lift? ...
How about writing an interpreter for TCL in TCL? By many peoples' standards, a language is no longer a toy language if you can write an interpreter or compiler for it in its own language.
Actually, I think the opposite may in fact be true. Tickle would be a cuter, warmer name (like Java, Python etc.), whereas Tcl looks like something IBM would invent. --Setok