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I came away from this impressed, but still thinking that it is a "toy language" in the sense that it is too powerful. You sometimes do not want to have to worry what a line of code means, and TCL does not allow that.

> The Tcl community developed a number of OOP systems, radical language modifications, macro systems, and many other interesting things, just writing Tcl programs

Well there's your problem. It becomes impossible to learn the language as a whole, because it is so flexible and everybody does things differently.

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>You sometimes do not want to have to worry what a line of code means, and TCL does not allow that.

Comments in Tcl work perfectly fine.

> Comments in Tcl work perfectly fine

I agree with what you're saying, but allow me to go meta.

Comments in Tcl are a bit strange. This works:

  # say howdy
  puts hello

But this does not:

  puts hello   # say howdy

For the later, you have to insert a semicolon:

  puts hello;  # say howdy

I get bitten by this time and time again.

Yeah I got bit by that too, once. But it makes sense. If everything is a command, then "#" must also be a command. Essentially like a NOOP.

Once I visualized it that way, I never got tripped up by that again.

And regardless of this fact, comments exist. They may not be as convenient as using // or // in C its friends, but they exist. To say that tcl does not allow one to know what a complicated line of code means is absurd.

> If everything is a command, then "#" must also be a command

In my mind, that's an argument that at least something shouldn't be a command. But perhaps it simplifies implementation enough to be worth it.

> To say that tcl does not allow one to know what a complicated line of code means is absurd.

Fully agree with you there. And for what it's worth, in the Tcl I encounter, there's rarely a line of code that complicated. Perl is often accused of being a write-only language. I think Tcl, if anything, is the opposite. It always seems readable.

You call that a "problem". C++ developers make money with that every day.

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