Interesting article - and the writing style's entertaining, too.
I can certainly relate: my first introduction to Tcl was the scripting in Quartus, and my intial reaction was mostly "Ewwww!". But once I figured out which kinds of brackets did what and started to appreciate things like being able to cascade timing constraint files and have variables defined in one file be visible from subsequent files, I developed a grudging respect for it.
The grudging respect gave way to outright admiration once I started to appreciate the minimalism and simplicity, and discovered just how trivially easy it is to write a Tcl extension or integrate it into a project as scripting language. I might think twice about using it outside the EDA space, but within that world I'd use it with no hesitation.
I can certainly relate: my first introduction to Tcl was the scripting in Quartus, and my intial reaction was mostly "Ewwww!". But once I figured out which kinds of brackets did what and started to appreciate things like being able to cascade timing constraint files and have variables defined in one file be visible from subsequent files, I developed a grudging respect for it.
The grudging respect gave way to outright admiration once I started to appreciate the minimalism and simplicity, and discovered just how trivially easy it is to write a Tcl extension or integrate it into a project as scripting language. I might think twice about using it outside the EDA space, but within that world I'd use it with no hesitation.