I would say that most of the weirdness of Tcl is not caused by age, but because at its core it is nothing else than shell without all the tradional unix shell s

I would say that most of the weirdness of Tcl is not caused by age, but because at its core it is nothing else than shell without all the tradional unix shell syntactic cruft. In the end Tcl is nothing else than shell with exactly two quoting mechanisms ("" and {}) and exactly two expansions ($variable and []), everything else is built as commands on top of this simple language.