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The idea that Tcl was a toy came from the 90s and the Tcl Wars Stallman was involved with. But to Stallman, anything other than Lisp is pretty much a toy. Tcl is indeed a deep, deep rabbithole -- again, deeper than our dimension allows and lined with toothed cilia... but I can totally see where a person might look in Tcl's deadlights and want to be there.

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Ironically Tcl is very Lisp-like in certain respects, though also quite different. Rabbitholes notwithstanding Tcl can be enormously useful and productive. In particular I think the built-in Tcl object-oriented features are a real asset and not nearly the same sort of rabbithole as you encountered in the past.

It does have very flexible metaprogramming capability and the syntax of the language can be extended in the language itself, very much like Lisp, and like Lisp it has a high skill ceiling and a huge possibility space to explore.

It's the ways in which it is not like Lisp, the features that Lisp hackers discovered decades ago were nests of bugs and confusion that... arghhh.

My overall impression of Tcl, however, is quite positive -- and Tcl/Tk is a JATO bottle for rapid GUI development that no Lisp implementation has yet been able to match -- not without embedding or incorporating Tcl itself (e.g., PS/Tk: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/PS%2FTk).

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