Python should try to displace Java

[Roy Smith]

"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
> You missed Ruby and TCL. Granted, TCL is probably only being held up
> by TK and Expect, though.

Don't kid yourself.  I work on a commercial application which includes 
almost 20,000 lines of TCL, and not a single line of it is Tk or Expect.  
As an embedded scripting language, it fills a very nice niche.

This particular collection of TCL code is the 3rd generation of 
scripting code for this application.  The first generation was a huge 
shell script, which was quickly outgrown.  The second generation was a 
home-brew language which was a complete failure.  The third generation 
was embedding TCL, which was a roaring success.

I've been known to mutter "TCL is a stupid language" more than a few 
times (typically during code reviews), but it does have a few things 
going for it.  It's dead simple to learn, reasonably powerful, and it's 
trivial to imbed (simplier than Python).

Still, for all that, I suspect it's a bit of an evolutionary dead end.