why did these companies choose Tcl over Python

[Paddy]

On Oct 30, 10:47 pm, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar... at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> > I would prefer to use Python but can't deny how popular Tcl is,  as
> > mentioned above,  so my question is why wasn't Python selected by
> > these companies as the choice of scripting languages for their
> > product?
>
> I think this question needs to be answered on a case-by-case basis,
> but my guess is that it is in most cases historical. Work on Tcl
> started in 1988, and it was the first (major?) embeddable scripting
> language (that is also free software etc). Python wasn't released
> until 1991, and wasn't first recognized as being just as easily
> embeddable (and I think early releases weren't as easily embeddable
> as today's Python is).
>
> Tcl's original objective was to support circuit design, so people
> in that field clearly knew that Tcl worked, but they were likely
> unaware of any alternatives (or else the future of these alternatives
> may have been uncertain).
>
> So at that time, Tcl would have been the obvious (because only)
> choice. Now these products are stuck with Tcl, and redoing all
> the work (including the existing extension modules!) in a different
> programming language would be a lot of work.
>
> Regards,
> Martin

Here is TCL's author talking about its roots: http://www.tcl.tk/about/history.html
The Electronic Design Automation industry was in some ways ahead of
other industries in adopting TCL as its major scripting language but
because of this I think it might now be suffering because, as capable
as TCL is, current EDA tools would benefit from reflecting what is
increasingly an object oriented compiled language core, as Python
objects for user manipulation.

- Paddy.