I highly recommend The Tcl Programming Language: A Comprehensive Guide:

https://www.magicsplat.com/ttpl/index.html

For those who are not aware, Tcl is actually part of standard Python distribution through TKinter.

There are many things Tcl has built in that are quite amazing, like a robust virtual filesystem support, reflective channels, and less known these days Starpacks (stand alone runtime) that bundle sources with the binary.

I am current working on bringing back kitcreator for an AI project that uses Tcl as a scripting environment over llama.cpp.

https://github.com/tclmonster/kitcreator

Roy Keene is the original author, and has done some really clever stuff here, like encrypting the VFS appended to the executable. I added compression to this. It provides some manner of obfuscating sources.

And actually, I am also working on using tohil to compile a static Python and load it as a Tcl extension, with the goal to have standalone Python applications bundled with their sources and completely loadable from within the VFS. This will provide a means to bundle TKinter with a “frozen” Python app.

https://github.com/tclmonster/tohil

"The European OpenACS and TCL/Tk conference will be in Bologna/Italy/Europe on July 10 & 11 2025." - this is crazy. Seems there are still people using OpenACS in 2025.

Because it works.

I introduced it into some of our release tooling in the mid-2000s. Easy to integrate, easy to understand, unsurprisingly good string/text handling, expect was very useful, and it’s not going to be used by anyone else, so no worries about version conflicts.

It ran successfully largely unchanged for around a decade.

it's a language that's trivial to implement because it's well designed and simple, it embeds very nicely, and it's fantastic for use as a debug shell and to implement guis. it's a great technician's language, if you work with technically-minded people who aren't necessarily programmers, it's a great way to hand them deep interactive power without the footguns of a forth.

  ; A comment
  (set-macro-character #\% (get-macro-character #\;))
  % Also a comment

  > modify the node in-place

I consider this anti-pattern [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070417190836/https://www.eecs....

Authors found themselves fighting with control flow graph modifications and replaced mutable graph with immutable one, modified by zippers. They achieved speed up of 11% in optimizing transformations, some of which they were unable to implement in mutable version. E.g., more complex optimizations were working faster.