i think TCL/Tk is too often overlooked as something ancient and of no use today. i can only recommend everyone interested in programming to take a look at it. it's really much more clean than many other languages wrt how well it has kept to its principles over time. the "everything is a string" thing really works, compared to the dynamic typing of other more popular languages. there is a lightweight gui toolkit which is surprisingly powerful and again rather comfortable to use. one thing missing are some more native modern web libraries, but there are some wrappers around for common c libraries. other libs are just really nice like tdom.org for xml/json/etc. processing.