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Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

Most of the digital semiconductor design EDA / CAD tools from Cadence and Synopsys use Tcl as the built in scripting language. I have to work with thousands of lines of Tcl code whether I want to or not.

I learned Tcl / Tk back in 1995 because I wanted to write GUI programs and Hello World in Motif was about 2 pages of boiler plate code while in Tcl / Tk it was about 2 lines.

Then I started in the chip design world and Tcl took over so it was good that I already knew it. I was teaching the older engineers Tcl so it helped me gain their respect.

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Although I never used Tcl myself, I've worked in/with teams that need to interface with these EDA tools, and most of the folks there are not SW programmers, but electronics folks who need to write Tcl to get their job done.

Their code sucked like crazy. Usually in such teams you are not evaluated by the quality of code.

Ever since then, any time I'm job hunting and I see a listing for a SW programmer that mentions Tcl, it's always been for EDA tools and I run in the other direction.

at my last job we used tcl for manufacturing tests automation. it was way better than the dsl they previously had. tcl was chosen because it was easy to port an interpreter to their c++ test automation framework

Maybe because EDA users think in terms of hardware description languages like Verilog. When I realized that they have to start with things as basic as clock edges and registering signals it dawned on me that that mindset also lends itself to TCL code unpalatable to SW engineers.

> Their code sucked like crazy. Usually in such teams you are not evaluated by the quality of code.

I worked in the semiconductor industry, specifically writing internal tools. I had to look at _many_ tools/scripts written in Tcl/SKILL/perl/awk/sed with some code being 30 years old and still being used.

Honestly, it wasn't the worse thing. There was usually very little abstraction, the code pretty much always told a story of what the writer was trying to achieve. Naming things was usually pretty bad and you'd get into some pretty gnarly regex/string matching, but at least it usually wasn't some over-complicated highly flexible but also restricting in-house framework.

Siemens NX uses it for the CAM post-processor customization.

What are your thoughts? How do you like it as a language?

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