Tcl

Reasons why Tcl appeals to the opposite sex

• Protyping: Tcl is extremely usefull for protoyping complex systems. Its powerful syntax lets you script something in 100 lines that would take 1,000 lines in a silly compiled langauge. This gives you a quick framework to start hanging your more serious code onto.
• Embedding: It embeddes nicely into Java. Why waste time prying open files with java, when Tcl can do it with 4 lines. While Tcl performace is an issue (compiled language still beat the pants off of interrupted languages*), Tcl cuts thru small tasks with ease.
• Matching: One of Tcl's finer points is its implemention of matching via regular expressions. While Perl is still champion of text parsing, Tcl gives Perl a run for its money. Since everything in Tcl is a string, everything can be used in pattern matching.
• Good in Bed: Ill explain this one when you are older.

*Yeah Yeah, there are exceptions to every rule.

This is the genealogy of the programming language Tcl:

Tcl was born in year 1988.
It became Tcl/Tk in year 1988.
It became Tcl/Tk 8.1 in year 1999, and has not changed much since that time.

This genealogy is brought to you by the Programming Languages Genealogy Project.

TCL stands for Tool Command Language and is pronounced "tickle". It is a scripting language that was created by Dr. John Ousterhout in UC Berkeley in the early 80's. From the begining, Ousterhout wanted an interpreted language that could be embedded into many different applications.

TCL is often accompanied by Tk, its graphical toolkit. Tk (and TCL with it) is remarkable for being widely cross platform, and being easy to program with. In fact, most major scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby also have bindings to Tk.

Because of its simple syntax, TCL is a very easily extensible language. This has encouraged the development of many TCL extensions, including Expect, and incr TCL (an Object Oriented extension to vanilla TCL).

While TCL might have had its heyday in the early 90's, it remains a very useful programming language with a healthy community surrounding it. It is being actively developed primarily by a "core team" of 14 people. Dr. Ousterhout is still actively involved, and provides the final decision if the core team deadlocks.

The application domains that TCL is used is traditionally in GUI frontend applications and as the embedded language in scriptable applications. It is however also suited for jobs that most scripting languages are used for such as text processing, web scripting, and rapid prototyping.

TCL is released under a BSD-syle license.
More information:
http://tcl.activestate.com