I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl

While I like Tcl, which I have used to write substantial portions of a shipping product, the author does make a good point about the difficulty of creating a language that is simultaneously a good programming language and a good scripting language: I love IPython dearly, but I've never seriously considered using it as a bash replacement (nor bash as a substitute for anything but the simplest Python scripts). As an aside, I have to praise one particular, easily overlooked…

About Tcl and the embedded world, a few years ago I wrote a single-file Tcl interpreter that is mostly compatible with current Tcl implementations (something is missing like namespaces, something was added like anonymous functions): http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html (source code is here: https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl) Now maintained by Steve Bennett, and actively used by some embedded folks.

Barely related but Tk/Ttk (in particular tkinter[1]) is criminally underrated for GUI tools. There's a fairly solid cross-platform GUI toolkit right there in the Python standard library and it's even native on Win32 and macOS (meanwhile there are e.g. bootstrap-like skins for it in case you don't like the Motif-look on Linux). There's really no need for every small Python GUI tool/script to require PyQt/PySide/wxPython and the non-wheel packaging shenanigans that go with that. [1] tkinter is actually a…

Okay, okay, I'll bite. Hear me, before the rotten tomatoes hit: I. like. TCL. In fact, I'm going to go out on a dangerous limb and say that complaining about the [expr] syntax - which seems to be his only concrete complaint in the whole article - reminds me of nothing so much as saying, "But Lisp is horrible - look at all those parentheses!" You've heard the trope that languages, as they get more advanced, begin to resemble Lisp?…