why did these companies choose Tcl over Python

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Oct 30, 2:25 pm, chewie54 <dfabrizi... at gmail.com> 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?
>

Here are some reasons why people choose language X over Y:

- History. We've always used X, so why should we use Y?
- Peer pressure. Everyone else uses X.
- Licensing. Language X's license fits our business better than
language Y.
- Support. It is easier/safer/etc... to get support for language X
over language Y. (In some cases, the company that wrote X provides
support contracts while language Y doesn't have such a company.)
- Customer demands. Our customers want language X support, not Y.
- Features. Language X does A, B, and C really well, while language Y
only does it a little bit or not very well.

You'd have to ask them why they do what they do, but it's probably a
combination of the above. Oftentimes, the reasons cited are based on
assumptions and not facts. Of course, objectively measuring any
language is difficult at best, so there is little hope of this ever
getting any better.

As far as performance, memory footprint, cross-platform support, I
don't believe Tcl is better than Python (and probably not worse), at
least compared to C.

Tcl might also be a more natural language for hardware people who have
a hard time accepting the more esoteric concepts of software
engineering. It's a straight-forward language with little in the way
of what they may consider fluff.