Side note: Ousterhout was famous for being the author of Tcl/Tk, which was a popular language and GUI toolkit in the early days of Linux (before Qt and GTK came along).
I wouldn't be surprised if many older Unixes are still running Tcl/Tk apps.
I wouldn't be surprised if many older Unixes are still running Tcl/Tk apps.
The Vienna based university, TU-Wien, still runs AOLserver and serves 40K users with it. OpenACS.org and dotLRN.org still use the same Tcl-based webserver today.
Gustaf Neumann shepherded the development of the use of OpenACS/dotLRN at TU-Wien, I think: http://nm.wu.ac.at/nm/neumann
Though I believe Lua is a smaller binary, which matters in some embedded scenarios. According to [1], the core Lua interpreter is 40kB with additional base libraries of 22kB, so total of 62kB.
There are a variety of "small TCL" implementations [2], and one of them, TinyTCL claims to be <60kB, excluding C library functions. I can say that for my embedded requirements, Lua would win...
This is for full featured *nix systems programming in the HPC world so ymmv.
I indeed don't see it having any benefit over Python or TCL in more sophisticated environments.
That said here are things I advise.
* No upvar/uplevel. Use a namespace. * Use apply wisely. * No ad-hoc (say swig inline wrappers) extensions without deep review. * If you are writing a front end in tk - think twice. * If you are doing OOP with TCL choose wisely.
Tk is still the quickest way to create a simple UI which is also highly portable across operation systems. With tclkit you can even create self contained Tcl/Tk applications on the big platforms (Win/Mac/Linux).
Or newer. e.g., I use gitk daily at work.