Comment by anthk

Then there's Object Pascal with classes where it's deal for RAD software (even from Lazarus) plus SQLite3 bindings. It would have been a good Java/C# alternative, but you know, we are still being dragged back because of Java/C# and C++.

All because Unix folks tried to create C with classes, or a crappy and bloated pseudo-Smalltalk OOP language to run everywhere (C++ under Unix/Motif, and Java from Sun).

Meanwhile, TCL/Tk was good enough for tons of cases. If Sun supported it instead of Java we could have been using something as portable as Java but with a far lighter VM and requeriments. SQLite3 was granted.

Just look at the shitload of applications created with VB5-6 under Windows. TCL/Tk could've get aficionados from both sides and create something cross-platform and playable. Minecraft with GL/DX bindings automatically compiled from C would weight far less...

RAD applications? tons of them for the office. No need for OLE for MSOffice, it would have proper DB backends. Multimedia? I'm pretty sure SDL and FFMPEG bindings for TCL would born in the spot. Speed? all the improvements for the JDK we were seeing over a decade would have been in TCL and it would be on par on the experiments made for V8 in JS.