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Comment by nickodell | Hacker News Reader

This is an impressively bad idea. Good work.

Actually, once I read what he REALLY seemed to be shooting for, I think it might actually be a GREAT idea!

Let's say you want to process a list of numbers, a set of data records, or something fairly complex. Internally, you can pass it between functions in a fairly compact, but almost illegible form. If a human user wants to see what's getting passed around, though, it could be handy if the system could automatically transform it to smoothing more human readable: tabulated, indented, pretty-printed, what-have-you.

I could definitely see a use for this, strange as it might seem.

+1, up thumb or whatever the current thing is.

Having spent my life in networking tech, Tcl...please die.

Noooooo, I like Tcl.

I am primarily working on algorithms and love Tcl for building simple, robust prototypes. It is not perfect (I wish UDP support was a part of a core language or standard library), but I use it surprisingly often. YMMV

Perhaps they choose TCL to emphasize this point.

TCL was the chosen language of the company we worked for at the time. I tempted the author to join my team, and we collaborated on the book 'Docker in Practice' while implementing Docker within that company 2013-2015, before we both left.

TCL is an unreasonably effective language for certain use cases (the company we worked for were driven by extremely tight deadlines and high performance requirements (appserver written in pure C in late 90s, with call-outs to TCL for business logic).

I haven't touched TCL since, though.

I've found Python, LUA, or anything else better from an end-user perspective. Integrating Python can be hard, but TCL vs LUA?

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