History of Tcl (tcl.tk)
"The Tcl scripting language grew out of my work on design tools for integrated circuits at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1980's. My students and I had written several interactive tools for IC design, such as Magic and Crystal. Each tool needed to have a command language (in those days people tended to invoke tools by typing commands; graphical user interfaces weren't yet in widespread use). However, our primary interest was in the tools, not their command languages. Thus we didn't invest much effort in the command languages and the languages ended up being weak and quirky. Furthermore, the language for one tool couldn't be carried over to the next, so each tool ended up with a different bad command language. After a while this became rather embarrassing.
In the fall of 1987, while on sabbatical at DEC's Western Research Laboratory, I got the idea of building an embeddable command language. The idea was to spend extra effort to create a good interpreted language, and furthermore to build it as a library package that could be reused in many different applications. The language interpreter would provide a set of relatively generic facilities, such as variables, control structures, and procedures. Each application that used the language would add its own features into the language as extensions, so that the language could be used to control the application. The name Tcl (Tool Command Language) derived from this intended usage."
