A modern take on Tcl is what we need, in my opinion.
Surely we should be able to build something nicer 30 years after the first release of Tcl.
Tcl's string representation for objects is just a serialization/deserialization mechanism, which seems to be pretty popular in other languages as well.
Additionally all of the cool things in Tcl such as coroutines, threads (as an additional, but included, package), great documentation delivered as man pages, virtual filesystem access, virtual time, safe interpreters for running untrusted code, a stable ABI (stubs) so that compiled extensions can be used for decades, a small memory as well as disk footprint, extremely cross-platform, easy to embed into larger programs as an extension language, easy to compile a large static program with Tcl as the "main" entrypoint, native BigNum support, many thousands of great packages, ....
What would a modern take on Tcl improve on Tcl that Tcl couldn't just build easier ?
Has something changed suddenly in the last 5 years? Yes, the docs had a decent API reference but everything slightly higher up than "what parameters this command has" was on that wiki with comments from 2004 marked as out of date by out of date comments from 2007...
Interested! Available?
[1] https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/tuapi/doc/trunk...
But now, to think of it, just using Node + TS (+ yarn) sounds better than Python.
What it begs is for a new tool. A single file, statically linked “super shell” that lets you do structured scripting and has builtins for a bunch of common things (reading in addresses, daemonizing processes, reading the process table, etc. and that tool needs to be build able on nearly everything. Now I like rust and the attention it is getting and the interest in safety and correctness. I can’t think of many places where I’d reach for bash but be happier writing rust, a lot of it is 15minute disposable programming jobs. At a glance, I think I’d trade 5minutes of set -e to find some error I skipped for 45 minutes of trying to rejigger things to properly borrow some shared value.