Thanks, this blog post was exactly the sort of discussion I was looking for!

The TL;DR:

- easy to write interactively because there's no fiddling with the parens, quoting, or commas you find in JS, Ruby, or Python

- uses [ and ] for subexpressions instead of ( and ), which makes typing easier

- "command" oriented, instead of "expression" oriented

- saner than shell while having many of the same advantages

> - uses [ and ] for subexpressions instead of ( and ), which makes typing easier

I would like to point out that in several non-US keyboard layouts, [ and ] are harder to type, not easier. For instance, on German keyboards, they are mapped to Right-Alt (AltGr) + 8/9, which is quite annoying to type compared to normal parentheses (which are mapped to Shift+8/9, with Shift being better placed and available on both the left and right side of the keyboard).

As a German I haven't use a German keyboard layout in years because the US layout easier in most cases (for examole all those curly braces in TeX).

All my colleagues would agree and did the same. I don't. I want äöü quickly available for chatting and other "quick" writing, while coding typing is usually not the bottleneck.

Is there a German keyboard layout such as?:

AltGr + a -> ä

AltGr + o -> ö

AltGr + u -> ü

I'm Polish and I'm very glad that our most common layout is like that for ąćęłńóśźż (with AltGr + x for ź). Currently I'm in Germany and I wonder if there is similar layout for German umlauts.

There seems to be a layout called "US international" which might help: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_US-International.svg

As a Swede, I can echo this. I'm so used to the US layout by now that I have to do a double take whenever I switch to the SE layout, or type on someone else's keyboard.

I used to get laptops and keyboards with the US layout on them, but stopped since the resale value in Sweden drops sharply because of it. Thankfully, I've touch typed since forever so I rarely look at the keyboard anyway. (Unless, of course, I have to type with the Swedish layout.)

I would also add that the "Everything is a String" paradigm makes it simple to reason about somewhat complex concepts. You don't have to try to teach beginners about objects and pointers. Just plain old text strings. Everything else is under the hood.

I miss some features of more modern languages though. TclOO (object-oriented extension) is minimally useful but lacks GC, so you have to keep track of all objects to manually destroy them when you are done. I miss easily passing around functions (procs), and saner local namespacing for functions (ie like in python). Exception handling is also a bit of a pain.

A lot of these things are addressed in Jim Tcl, but it hasn't seen much adoption.

http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html

Pragmatically it is actually a giant pain to use. Its bizarre text substitution semantics are hugely unintuitive compared to modern languages.