I don't know why many people in the OpenACS community,
still talk as if Tcl a disadvantage, well, they say it doesn't matter that OpenACS rely on Tcl.
Which make it seem that they are embarassed or trying to hide or avoid that fact.
I think Tcl is a huge advantage, and the primary reason, I got interest in OpenACS.
Tcl is a great general purpose scripting language with many key extensions and tool kits.
One of which is "OpenACS", the web tool kit.
Others include,
"XOTcl" (a very moderm object system, only ruby can dare to challenge)
"Tk" for rapid flexible and robut UI prototyping and development (developing UI is not a brain tease riddle anymore, at least compared to GTK)
"Expect" (I don't know much about it, but from the little I read it seem very interesting)
Please visit http://wiki.tcl.tk to learn more about how flexible and useful Tcl is.
Learn about the deployment options, which is yet another key Tcl advantag.
Learn about how Tcl is the ultimate glue language.
Learn what is a glue language, what is command interface, and more.
I think Tcl is huge advantage, and thank God OpenACS doesn't use things like Java or Perl (there is already tons of framework extensible in those languages)
So I guess what most people mean when they say, don't worry about Tcl is that, unless you start wanting to extend OpenACS, i.e. write a module, you don't need to worry about Tcl.
But I would hate to see OpenACS turn its back on Tcl, cause if I ever need to write extension code I want it to be in the simple, readable, flexible, extensible, scalable web friendly, object orientation friendly, RAD friendly Tcl.
Tcl is very sophisticated, so to take advantage of some of what it provide, you will need to learn about sophisticated topics. But part of the Tcl genious, is that you can walk that way, step by step, Tcl have the grace to hide the complexties, and expose them when you have too.
