why did these companies choose Tcl over Python

[MrJean1]

That is correct.  Tcl has it roots at UC Berkeley and was originally
used
to provide a command line interface for electronic design automation
(EDA)
tools.

Most commercial EDA vendors at that time were using their own,
proprietary
command language.  Only later became Tcl widely adopted among EDA
vendors
and -even more important- among users, electronic designers.

There is a large base of Tcl scripts in existence among users.
Replacing
that is practically and commercially simply not feasible regardless of
the strengths or weaknesses of Tcl vs any other language.

Recently, Python is getting more traction inside EDA, especially for
internal use and internal development and in some cases as the design
language of newer EDA tools.

/Jean Brouwers


On Oct 30, 3:47 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