Application Development: Tcl Programming Language: 20 Things You Don`t Know

Tcl is known as a powerful yet succinct programming language. It originally derives from "Tool Command Language," but was then rendered as "Tcl" rather than "TCL." When spoken of, the language is pronounced as "tickle" or "tee-see-ell." Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout, founder and chairman of Electric Cloud, and a professor at Stanford University. Ousterhout created Tcl while he was a professor at University of California, Berkeley. Originally "born out of frustration" with programmers devising their own "poor quality" languages intended to be embedded into applications, according to the author, Tcl gained acceptance on its own. It is commonly used for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs and testing. Tcl is used on embedded systems platforms, both in its full form and in several other small-foot printed versions. Tcl is also used for CGI scripting and as the scripting language for the Eggdrop bot. Tcl is popularly used today in many automated test harnesses, both for software and hardware, and has a following in the Network Testing and SQA communities. The combination of Tcl and the Tk GUI toolkit is referred to as Tcl/Tk which is often pronounced "tickle tock."