The main benefit for shell scripting is the ability to pass data seamlessly between your script and any programs that take and output text. No serialization/par

The main benefit for shell scripting is the ability to pass data seamlessly between your script and any programs that take and output text. No serialization/parsing is required. What I consider to be the biggest benefit of Tcl in general compared to the more mainstream scripting languages is the pervasive immutability. In Tcl values are strings and strings are immutable. It encourages you to write programs that consists of a reusable, easy-to-test collection of pure functions and a task-specific procedural or (more rarely) OO core.