Malte you are right that it is not really what should be in this thread, Maybe we should start a few parallel threads based on this discussion.
I would like to stress that all of my discussions surrounding the language are because this thread has identified that TCL and it's shortcomings are one of the barriers to getting wider developer involvement.
OO or another language does not address any of the other issues, such as visibility. But taking visibility, if we are to market ourselves to developers (or their managers) then we must solve the developer issues first to avoid a poor first impression.
On the subject of languages, your idea to use ns_java was exactly my idea that I mentioned earlier about ns_perl. I don't particularly like the Java way of doing things, but with luck it may be possible to enable ns_java and ns_perl at the same time (and my dislike of Java doesn't count as a choice criteria ;)
The catch 22 is that any other supported language would need to be documented and supported nearly as well as the TCL Api. Again with luck, api calls should be simple translations allowing the api-doc to show calling examples from all supported languages.
