FWIW, recent releases of Tcl have built-in dicts (hash tables), which greatly improve over the old "associative arrays".

What I missed the most when doing Tcl was support for first class functions / closures.

JimTCL seems to adress many of the pain points, for example it adds closures garbage-collected OO. http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html