SS 25Jan2005:
It's well known that many Lisp dialects, like Scheme, have features that Tcl does not have. For example first class continuations, automatic tail calls optimization, more speed. This page is instead my personal opinion about what in Tcl is better than in Lisp.
I used Scheme to write Web applications for some time before to switch to Tcl, mostly for the reasons below. Note that I like Lisp a lot, I'm a great fan of it. One reason why I like Tcl is that I find it similar to Lisp in some aspect, similar to what I enjoyed of Lisp, I mean.
This is my list of things I like more in Tcl over Lisp:
Please feel free to comment, expecially if you think some of the points are not fair.
--The #scheme room on irc.freenode.com responds thusly; comments please http://wiki.tcl.tk/1341014:24:39 <Catfive>There are still people that use Tcl?14:26:54 <xerox>Ok, got it.14:30:03 <forcer>slack_tcl: Argument 1, Macros: Tcl represents everything as strings (formally). That makes optimization horrible, and requires a runtime interpreter. Argument 2, auto-type-conversion: Nice for small
stuff, leads to annoying bugs in bigger programs. Argument 3, serialization: Use WRITE to serialize data structures. Argument 4, Strings:
A list is a compound data type, a string is not compound, but needs a parser to be so; the basi14:30:13 <forcer>c data type of a language should be a compound type;
Scheme has wonderful support for HTML/XML, because HTML/XML
is not about strings, but about structure, which Scheme can
represent very well. Argument 5, less fragmentation: True (whether that's a pro or con is subjective). Argument 6, event-driven programming: True; Tcl has a better standard
library than R5RS; most scheme implementations have a good
one as well, and using cont14:30:13
<forcer>inuations, event-driven programming can be abstracted away, which is even better than a basic foundation, which also can be implemented easily in Scheme. ;-)14:30:14 <forcer>``Years ago at an X conference in San Jose, Ousterhout gave a talk on Tcl/Tk. I came away from the talk thinking "Man, what a poorly implemented Lisp interpreter that is!" (Mike McDonald)''