At the time, Tcl was being used for fairly large apps (and it still is, e.g. in WaveSurfer). As for large scale suitability, I would guess that both Tcl and gui

At the time, Tcl was being used for fairly large apps (and it still is, e.g. in WaveSurfer). As for large scale suitability, I would guess that both Tcl and guile nowadays are eclipsed by Lua for embedded scripting, which to me would suggest that "simple" won out over "powerful". What is not mentioned in that thread (at least not in RMS' original message) is that what triggered his edict was that somebody extended gdb with Tcl as the extension language. This was an absolutely reasonable use case for Tcl - the lightweight syntax makes it perfect as an interactive, embedded scripting language. This discussion led to the creation of Guile, the withering of Tcl support in gdb, and eventually the introduction of a gdb that used Guile as its extension language — in 2014, 20 years after RMS decided that the Tcl extension (which I believe pretty much worked already) was unacceptable. Of course, as astute readers will already have guessed, Tcl was BSD licensed...