I am forced to use tcl a lot at work because that's what the ASIC tool vendors settled on for a scripting language. It's awful. Just plain awful. I avoid it as much as I can, but I'm forced to use it thanks to Synopsys.
The Synopsys extensions are a bear to work with but at least you can define procs which was impossible to do with their old scripting language where you had to simulate them with repeated includes.
...TCL doesn't have macros, it has fexprs, and uplevel. It also has no effective hygene mechanisms, and unless you want to use regex to parse the tree every time your function fires, you can't do the kinds of code transforms macros can.
Don't get me wrong, TCL is super cool, but it doesn't have quite the same powers as lisp. Although you are correct, it's a better lisp than ruby.
I remember tcl in the early 90s then it disappeared from my radar, mostly web and mobile apps. Honest question: is it still relevant in some application area?
It's still great at what it was always great at: embedding, acting as a CLI, and doing random grunt work. It's Lua's main competitor, but it can also go toe-to-toe with python and ruby in terms of libraries in some areas (although by no means all of them). In particular, the ease of construction for graphical applications is arguably unmatched (IUP is probably the closest), SQLite was built to work with it, metakit is handy as well in the DB area, it has a great event loop, several OO models, solid unix integration, sold FFI and excellent embedding (as you'd expect), Starkits, which means you can distribute your whole TCL sourcetree as a single file, and a ton of other stuff.
So while it's not as popular, relevancy isn't an issue.
This comment is a great representation of tcl's relevance, which is nice to see because tcl is often dismissed nowadays by people who don't understand it
