[p4l4g4]

Same here! Tcl/tk is a lovely little language and much under appreciated by many! Interesting software started in tcl, such as redis, expect and sqlite. Still use some tcl through environment-modules, in my personal work setup.

Have to say that lisps are very nice too, in my opinion. Started learning a little common lisp recently and was surprised by its elegance. I think lisps can be very maintainable, when care is taken. It's easy to write unreadable programs, but this also holds for tcl. With great power comes great responsibility.

[dwringer]

I think a lot of programmers as they are first learning their first language go through a phase of trying to count brackets and parentheses and failing miserably (those bugs are horrible to hunt down) before finding editors that help match them for you. Even then, many editors don't do a great job of this so coders develop a certain aversion to using many parentheses or brackets of any type. This is also rooted in the conventional C philosophies that more than two levels of indentation are a bad thing.

At least that was how I used to see things, prior to getting familiar with Lisp and emacs. Now I find myself using all kinds of parentheses in every language so as to make order-of-operations more explicit at a quick glance. I even learned to count parentheses and almost enjoy it.

I think learning Python's complete-opposite approach of getting rid of brackets in most cases and using indentation-only also clarified my thinking on the matter. I find that this brings back the old problem of mismatched-bracket bug hunting, but worse because indentation levels can get shifted and then there's no amount of paren-matching that will help sort things out.

In essence, I think everyone should learn Python and Lisp, then see which philosophy they like better.