Decades ago Synopsys chose it for Design Compiler. Mostly Hobson's choice (what good alternative did they have?) But it was an awful language because it was so

Decades ago Synopsys chose it for Design Compiler. Mostly Hobson's choice (what good alternative did they have?) But it was an awful language because it was so limited. Many commands in DC naturally want to return objects. But those don't exist in Tcl (maybe they do now?). So DC had to invent "collections" to make up for the limitations. Which confused the heck out of engineers. Resulting in Stack Overflow questions such as this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17864980/collections-to-list-in-tcl https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17864980/collections-to-... So, yeah, EDA uses Tcl but its for historical reasons rather than because its a good tool for that purpose.