Why would I want to use Tcl?
Because you want to write working systems, not talk about it.
Power: you can produce working systems in Tcl faster and easier than just about any other language.
That's a generalisation, of course. It's easier to write some classes of programs in different languages. But here, Tcl wins again:
Expressiveness: Tcl enables you to write an interpreter for just about any problem domain very quickly.
You can emulate just about any special purpose language. Not the syntax! The abstract machine: the set of primitives you need to invoke with the arguments you need to pass. Simplicity: Tcl's syntax is so simple, so unobtrusive, so degenerate that it's nearly invisible.
Here's the syntax: command+arguments->result. There are some other useful bits of syntactic sugar ($var is a variable's value, script is the result of evaluating the script.
Speed: And it's FAST. Well, actually Tcl is fast, but as a very high level language it's not going to be *as* fast as writing it in assembler. So compromise and write the time-sensitive components in C instead: Intersperse your Tcl programs with C, to make the hot-spots as fast as you like.
Linking Tcl to C is child's play with critcl. Tcl+critcl delivers the best of both worlds.
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