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The little language that could.

“Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.” (Larry Wall, October 1997)

Tkinter[0] was apparently released in 1994, so mildly interesting he didn't say "Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like other programming languages."

[0] https://grokipedia.com/page/Tkinter

It's not really ported. tkinter just builds a full Tcl interpreter as a Python extension and passes command strings over to it. This is the use case Tcl was designed for. You can get access to the underlying Tcl instance and issue non-Tk commands.

Technically correct (the best kind of "correct").

My next question to myself was what hardware was running Tcl in c.1997 Cisco equipment? What porting effort was required? I understand there was some proprietary feature work for Cisco IOS, but I don't know what architectural work was required.

Long term, the Cisco router support became the non-recursive execution engine (of Tcl 8.6) which stopped things from blowing up on the tiny stack sizes that Cisco equipment is configured with.

And which gives us tailcalls and coroutines.

They don't make them like they used to

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