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Comment by nestorD | Hacker News Reader

Having discovered the TCL programming language because of a single person using it in a bioinformatic lab I can second the recommendation.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370226 and marked it off-topic. Not that Tcl isn't a fine language.

TCL/TK is probably one of the most underrated GUI frameworks out there.

I once tried it; well, Expect specifically, which is really an executable wrapper of TCL with a library loaded. I ended up ditching it and using ruby's "expect" library. I remember having issues with scope. Expect functions you call would manipulate the scope of the caller. So when I wrapped some code in a function and called that in its place, things wouldn't work, because state wouldn't be handled in the same scope anymore. That means I wouldn't be able to abstract anything. No reusable units of code. I'd have to keep expect's calls all in the same scope.

TCL and Expect seem pretty cool in concept, but Expect's implementation seems awful.

Tcl/Expect are both heavily used at Cisco for router and switch automation. But recently, we've been shifting to Python for testing and automation, which I think is a step in the right direction (e.g., pyATS[1]).

[1]: https://developer.cisco.com/site/pyats/

I used tkinter python bindings, very fun. Zero mental burden.

Also tk was used as Digital Domain (James Cameron FX company) Nuke compositing software. Sooo.. I guess it's fine.

TCL/Tk is used heavily in finance/wall street.

I don't know about finance, but I think it's used heavily in aviation.

Where? Aside from the few OCaml fans, I’ve only ever seen bog-standard Java/C++/Python

It's used heavily at Intel, in hardware verification.

Virtually all EDA (electronic design automation) tools include a Tcl shell that echoes back any GUI action as a Tcl command. This makes it very easy to write Tcl scripts that perform repetitive actions (e.g., load HDL source, compile design, simulate, check value of signal).

No it's not. Languages most commonly used in finance are: C/C++, Python, Java, Scala, Julia, Matlab, R, and KDB.

Aplusdev.org used the tk part. While APL is used heavily in many financial institutions I am not sure how widely A+ is used.

A+ was invented by Arthur Whitney for JP Morgan (iirc). I'm sure they have some things in house still using it, but that it's mostly been deprecated by Whitney's Kdb+ environment which is sold by Kx Systems. It is the APL like "K" language bundled with a database generally run on SSD. I believe it is quite pricey.

According to the aplusdev.org site it's Morgan Stanley. I have zero knowledge of what the current status is inside that or any other company.

Ah, similar name. Thanks for pointing out my mistake.

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