why did these companies choose Tcl over Python

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> 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