way back when, a large amount of AOL stuff was written in tcl. AOLServer was one, and they actually opened sourced it - https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver

And lest you think that AOLserver is dead based on the lack of new activity on that github repo (which is just a mirror, BTW), Naviserver - https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver - which was forked from AOLserver some time ago, just released a new version yesterday.

Almost all of my exposure to TCL was IRC clients (xircon) and bots (eggdrop) in the 90s. Also my first job used it in some capacity that I forget, but it was through the tcl at that job that I had my first exposure to an event driven framework with chaining (twisted python style). It's a pretty odd language, but has some interesting and powerful ideas in it.

Mine was the ArsDigita stack and Vignette StoryServer. There was a lot of the latter in the wild for a long time.

Expect[1] (a Tcl-based tool) is still quite useful despite its age, and Don Libes' book[2] is a devops classic (if there is such a thing). The examples directory[3] from expect's source code repository should help you get the flavor of good Tcl programming.

`brew install expect`

`apt-get install expect`

Readily available on many other platforms as well, including Windows.

[1] http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm

[2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do

[3] http://expect.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/expect/expect/examp...

GCC testsuite is still written in DejaGnu, which is written in Expect.

http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/

It works for what it does.

    > It seems to be used in GUIs for biological and medical
    > sciences only, which is distant from my field.

Technically that's Tk, isn't it? I've written quite a lot of Perl that uses Tk before, and there was even an ORA book about it.

Well, yes. Technically. Although I personally haven't seen Tcl in use without Tk.

I too had that impression.

I can vouch for (1) being correct since I am managing an HPC Cluster for a company right now. The way to to is modules.sf.net (or the newer and nicer Lmod which is Lua).

The usual need is for a multitude of versions being avaible and easily usable. This starts at the compiler level and goes up to stuff like I have 5 versions of Tool X. This needs Python 2.7.3 (yes exactly that version). Now make it easy for me to use it.

It has been my only touching point with TCL so far -- I. Don't. Like. It.

Well, you might not notice Tcl if you see it sometimes.

For example have a look at the build scripts in MacPorts, those are valid Tcl programs (if you load the needed procs first). https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.examples.html

As Tcl is very often used for DSL style usecases, you might mistaken Tcl code for more or less pseudo code, config files or something like that.

TiVo started out as a Tcl house too. Their boxes have a Tcl tcp socket server that I built installed on each one.