Python is excellent, although I'd still give Tcl a small edge over Python for quick use. I find event driven, sockets and serial ports a bit more tedious with

Python is excellent, although I'd still give Tcl a small edge over Python for quick use. I find event driven, sockets and serial ports a bit more tedious with Python. The suite of first class objects in Tcl is very appropriate. But I have more experience with Tcl, so there's another bias. There's a way to do state machine patterns with Tcl that I've not seen in any other language - arrays of code-strings indexed by state - you "eval $fsm($state)". I'm sure there are other languages that do this, so observer bias. That, with event-driven socket/serial port/file I/O is where it shines the most. The strengths are really the Tcl core team, who have all been at it for a long time, have excellent backgrounds and don't ship a lot of problems. IMO, Tcl's "obscurity" ( relative to Perl ) was a saving grace - Tcl moved at a more deliberate pace. I also tend to trust my own Tcl code more than things developed in other ways - I've used it to find countless bugs in other peoples' stacks and libraries. I have not used static compilation, so I'll withhold comment. There is freewrap at least for making a standalone Tcl application. It basically embeds a Tcl interpreter with the "executable". Also - I think the way to learn Tcl is to use the Brent Welch book.