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I've had people tell me in the past that TCL is used in all kinds of inconspicuous areas. This is the second time I've seen real world usage of it, the first be

I've had people tell me in the past that TCL is used in all kinds of inconspicuous areas. This is the second time I've seen real world usage of it, the first being FPGA toolchains.

auxym 6y ago
I've heard it's used a lot in EE design software (PCB design, or FPGA as you mentioned). My experience with Tcl is as part of Altair's suite of mechanical simulation (FEA, MBD, etc) software, which is quite popular in aerospace and automotive. It has its warts (associative arrays) but it's still a neat little language. EIAS actually works pretty well as an abstraction tool. I'd take it over VB (eg, excel VBA) anyday as a macro/automation language. Good post on tcl by antirez, creator of redis: http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
- bloaf 6y ago
  Yeah, I use it in chemical process simulation and I pretend arrays don't exist. Dictionaries for everything, unless my software version is old enough that the Tcl version doesn't support them.
tyingq 6y ago
Another example is F5 load balancers. It's their embedded scripting for health checks, content transformations, etc. There's a list of other places it's used here: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl
- non-entity 6y ago
  Oh wow I completely forgot about Cisco's IOS.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  So it's not only sweetwater molecular dynamics that uses TCL but CCP4 as well. Nice! (Coot uses Scheme, though.)
  - gnufx 6y ago
    Yes, I recall Paul Emsley getting more than that right. At one time the area was continually shifting around TCL, Perl, Python, not really finishing anything off. That was mainly one person's influence for some reason.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I worked for HCI, which was healthcare.com, back in the day. Our entire UI and data layer, at the time, was TCL/TK. Things changed, of course, but TCL did have a lot influence in the Health Care/HL7 world...which marches on.
neilv 6y ago
Two reasons: it was targeted as an embeddable application extension language (kinda like Python); and, thanks to Tk, it was a relatively easy way to make passable GUI interfaces on Unixes. (There was also a very brief attempt early in the Web to use Tcl for Web development, as an arguably superior alternative to then-popular things like Perl CGI, but that didn't take over.) What people should've been using for embeddable extension languages is a Scheme implementation, which, besides other merits, wasn't crippled by an evaluation model based on string expansion. I was in charge of one such extension language for a system that cost 5 figures a seat, and Tcl's string evaluation wasn't that up to representing objects and graph references well. (At the time, extension languages of major applications were often some simple/custom Lisp.) Tcl was pretty neat, in how much more clever it was about some kinds of string evaluation than Unix shells, but a Scheme would've still been a better choice.
- gnufx 6y ago
  TCL is fat,slow,and lacks staying power. — (SIOD author) George Carrette, 1994 At least we could direct people who wouldn't see the light towards Python at that stage.

I've had people tell me in the past that TCL is used in all kinds of inconspicuous areas. This is the second time I've seen real world usage of it, the first being FPGA toolchains.

auxym 6y ago

I've heard it's used a lot in EE design software (PCB design, or FPGA as you mentioned). My experience with Tcl is as part of Altair's suite of mechanical simulation (FEA, MBD, etc) software, which is quite popular in aerospace and automotive. It has its warts (associative arrays) but it's still a neat little language. EIAS actually works pretty well as an abstraction tool. I'd take it over VB (eg, excel VBA) anyday as a macro/automation language. Good post on tcl by antirez, creator of redis: http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html

bloaf 6y ago
Yeah, I use it in chemical process simulation and I pretend arrays don't exist. Dictionaries for everything, unless my software version is old enough that the Tcl version doesn't support them.

tyingq 6y ago

Another example is F5 load balancers. It's their embedded scripting for health checks, content transformations, etc. There's a list of other places it's used here: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl

non-entity 6y ago
Oh wow I completely forgot about Cisco's IOS.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
So it's not only sweetwater molecular dynamics that uses TCL but CCP4 as well. Nice! (Coot uses Scheme, though.)
- gnufx 6y ago
  Yes, I recall Paul Emsley getting more than that right. At one time the area was continually shifting around TCL, Perl, Python, not really finishing anything off. That was mainly one person's influence for some reason.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I worked for HCI, which was healthcare.com, back in the day. Our entire UI and data layer, at the time, was TCL/TK. Things changed, of course, but TCL did have a lot influence in the Health Care/HL7 world...which marches on.

neilv 6y ago

Two reasons: it was targeted as an embeddable application extension language (kinda like Python); and, thanks to Tk, it was a relatively easy way to make passable GUI interfaces on Unixes. (There was also a very brief attempt early in the Web to use Tcl for Web development, as an arguably superior alternative to then-popular things like Perl CGI, but that didn't take over.) What people should've been using for embeddable extension languages is a Scheme implementation, which, besides other merits, wasn't crippled by an evaluation model based on string expansion. I was in charge of one such extension language for a system that cost 5 figures a seat, and Tcl's string evaluation wasn't that up to representing objects and graph references well. (At the time, extension languages of major applications were often some simple/custom Lisp.) Tcl was pretty neat, in how much more clever it was about some kinds of string evaluation than Unix shells, but a Scheme would've still been a better choice.

gnufx 6y ago
TCL is fat,slow,and lacks staying power. — (SIOD author) George Carrette, 1994 At least we could direct people who wouldn't see the light towards Python at that stage.