I've always had Tcl on my list of languages to learn "when I have some spare time", but there's always something 'better' to learn instead, so I haven't done it yet.
How relevant / popular is Tcl in 2024, really? Is it a language still worth learning in 2024? Can someone who is into Tcl and thinks so convince me that it's a language worth learning?
A while back I wrote a blog post about why I think Tcl is special - https://colin-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/10/why-im-tcl-ish.ht... .
Thus I like Tcl a lot fundamentally and think it's an interesting language, but it doesn't have the huge library that, say, Python or Clojure have so I don't see myself really using Tcl much. I think Lua stole a lot of Tcl's thunder as a language that's easy to embed in a bigger application. (I remember talking w/ someone who chose Lua over Tcl as an extension language for a big FORTRAN program in the 1990s)
The tk UI toolkit was the Unix answer to Visual Basic, it's very easy to code up little GUI applications if you don't care what they look like. If you do care what they look like you can improve things with more work but a tk app will never look great compared to a 2024 Electron or WinUI app.
One thing I found out is that unlike modern UI frameworks, tk does not do color management. I have a monitor which is more-or-less AdobeRGB and when I display an ordinary sRGB JPEG it is the job of the application to give Windows the image in the color space of the monitor. tk has no conception of this so the sRGB goes out to the monitor and is displayed as if it was AdobeRGB. Other modern features such as accessibility are missing
https://sourceforge.net/p/tcl/mailman/message/36955189/
So it's hard for me to recommend tk for GUI development.