According to my recollection and accounts of others I've read, a huge part of Python's early success was the maintainers' decision to support a comprehensive "b

According to my recollection and accounts of others I've read, a huge part of Python's early success was the maintainers' decision to support a comprehensive "batteries included" distribution of extension modules, including binary compiled libraries. Tcl made the crucial (in retrospect wrong) decision not to support a central extension package repository or well-stocked releases and chose to focus on the core. This forced users to scrounge the web for extensions and hope they compiled on their platforms, and depend on sketchy support from individual authors. The OOP craze played a significant role as well I think. I recall that in the late 1990s Tcl was part of something of a renaissance of varied programming paradigms escaping academia and getting applied in the wild (partly in the form of clever Tcl extensions). But Java/OOP and WWW/server-client killed that movement dead.