I would also add that the "Everything is a String" paradigm makes it simple to reason about somewhat complex concepts. You don't have to try to teach beginners

I would also add that the "Everything is a String" paradigm makes it simple to reason about somewhat complex concepts. You don't have to try to teach beginners about objects and pointers. Just plain old text strings. Everything else is under the hood. I miss some features of more modern languages though. TclOO (object-oriented extension) is minimally useful but lacks GC, so you have to keep track of all objects to manually destroy them when you are done. I miss easily passing around functions (procs), and saner local namespacing for functions (ie like in python). Exception handling is also a bit of a pain. A lot of these things are addressed in Jim Tcl, but it hasn't seen much adoption. http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html