To my mind, there's a tremendous irony in the 1994 flame war. A user of Tcl since the 1990's I'd read, and been amused by, the hyperbole contained in those lon

To my mind, there's a tremendous irony in the 1994 flame war. A user of Tcl since the 1990's I'd read, and been amused by, the hyperbole contained in those long-ago comments a number of times. Not that flaming doesn't still happen, such emotion isn't hard to find, though the subjects in dispute vary, the form of battle remains the same. Goes without saying that there's a nub of truth in those ancient rants. Tcl can be kind of hard to catch on to, but then again, the Gnu "replacement", the Guile implementation of Scheme, is also hardly a mainstream favorite. Plenty of hate is expressed toward Lisp-derived fully parenthesized languages, Scheme included. The not-so-dirty secret in the "language war" is that Tcl is itself very much a Lisp-like language, and over the years has increasingly adopted many features that make it even closer to languages like Scheme. Having become reasonably fluent in both Tcl and Scheme I see similarities that outweigh syntactic differences. Not identical of course, but translating programs across them is fairly straightforward compared to C-like code, e.g., Javascript. Maybe Lisp derivatives are an acquired taste, or maybe there some inborn twisted brain thing that entices some and repels others. At any rate, I'm convinced Tcl and Scheme are very capable languages, admittedly different in approach vs. more commonly used systems. Looking back it is ever so obvious that the old war was fought between two sects of the same tribe, and isn't that often the source of the fiercest rivalries.