I love this article. The few times I've worked with Tcl I've found it an absolute joy to use. I just hope that people don't mistake his conclusion.
The core benefit to Tcl is also its main detriment. Tcl takes off in places like OpenOCD because its incredibly powerful simplicity makes it incredibly tiny. You can throw it in pretty much anywhere as an embedded language and it will buy you a TON of functionality. If you want it to be performant, however, you'll wind up writing a lot of piecewise optimizations which will ultimately cause you to lose the size benefit.
So no, it's not a toy language by any means. And yes, its simplicity yields incredible LISP-like power. However, it's not a language I'd _ever_ use to write the core of anything where performance is of concern.
The core benefit to Tcl is also its main detriment. Tcl takes off in places like OpenOCD because its incredibly powerful simplicity makes it incredibly tiny. You can throw it in pretty much anywhere as an embedded language and it will buy you a TON of functionality. If you want it to be performant, however, you'll wind up writing a lot of piecewise optimizations which will ultimately cause you to lose the size benefit.
So no, it's not a toy language by any means. And yes, its simplicity yields incredible LISP-like power. However, it's not a language I'd _ever_ use to write the core of anything where performance is of concern.