I'm a long time user of Tcl. For me, the biggest strength of Tcl is it's C API. It's quite straightforward to implement extensions. That, and the people that were involved in the language early on are incredibly smart and creative.
I had the good fortune of working with Michael McLennan and George Howlett for a while (both mentioned in the referenced history).
Michael's "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" is a fantastically written programming reference. He was a prolific creator of interesting applications and toolkits. I recall him creating a GUI for our boring corporate bug database where he added a points system to make fixing bugs "more fun".
George managed to avoid incrementing the version number on his BLT toolkit by appending letters of the alphabet to releases. I never did learn why. I just checked and I see he made it all the way to 2.4z!
I had the good fortune of working with Michael McLennan and George Howlett for a while (both mentioned in the referenced history).
Michael's "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" is a fantastically written programming reference. He was a prolific creator of interesting applications and toolkits. I recall him creating a GUI for our boring corporate bug database where he added a points system to make fixing bugs "more fun".
George managed to avoid incrementing the version number on his BLT toolkit by appending letters of the alphabet to releases. I never did learn why. I just checked and I see he made it all the way to 2.4z!