On the topic of expr, though, it can be avoided if desired in favor of Lisp-style prefix operators: http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/mathop.htm
Little wasn't a slam on Tcl, if you think that then you miss the point. Little is trying to bring people to Tcl. The Tcl ecosystem has a boatload of good stuff, people should check it out.
But many people are put off by Tcl's syntax, it's fine for glue, which is what Ousterhout intended, but it sucks for 300,000 lines of code. If you want to write big programs then perhaps some type checking could help you. And perhaps some familiar syntax might help. Little is for people that have to maintain a pile of code.
is decent place to start. Then move on to
and there are all the Tk (GUI) APIs and libraries.
If you wade through that, or you get stuck, #tcl on freenode is a great resource.
Edit: #tcl told me to pass on this:
I'm aware of tsv package (shared variable), but this is just sharing scalar variables or arrays. You cannot share objects, procedures, namespaces, resources, etc - and that is the major reason for sharing memory across threads.
1) Application memory consumption grows more than it should, because same extensions have to be loaded several times in the same application, but in separate threads;
2) Resources such as images (or any other kinds), or OO objects, cannot be transferred between threads efficiently, the only way is to serialize them to scalar representation, which then can be passed through either tsv (mentioned above) variables, or through a message to another thread - then deserialize them there. Apart from precious time which it costs, you also make a full copy of resource/object, growing memory consumption even more.
For stuff that has to be fast, I generally reach for 'C', so I have not plumbed the depths of performance with sockets in Tcl.
Again, though, I drank the "everything is event driven" Kool-Aid years ago and it works for me.
Not cherry picked, an "official" page describing lindex: http://wiki.tcl.tk/1481 Objectively compare that with most any other language's docs for lists/arrays/whatever. "Everything is a string" does have some downfalls.
All I meant is that it was clear from the context that an example was chosen showing a weakness of the language (relative to standard C-like syntax) and that it's not quite fair to judge the whole language based on that one example.
Tcl's incredibly simple syntax and lack of syntactic sugar are what lead to situations like that example. But those same things are also responsible for making the language Lisp-like and fairly homoiconic. You can do incredible things in Tcl thanks to its simple syntax which is amenable to macros and code generation.