Back in the 1990's, Tcl was probably the best way to do GUI development on Unix. Qt was commercial at the time, Gtk didn't exist, and everything else was saddled with baroque API's, commercial licenses, ugly asthetics, or some combination of the three.
In that context, Tcl/Tk was magical... you could put together a window with a button and an event handler inside of five lines of code. (And it would look pretty good when you were done.) If you weren't hung up on drag and drop UI building, it was arguably a better way to assemble UI components than VisualBASIC. I spent a year or two doing research UI development in Tcl and loved the tool chain.
On the other hand, Tcl got swamped with a number of forces that conspired against it in the long run. In some ways, Tk was a deficit, as good as it was... I think it tended to pigeonhole the language a bit more than was fair. Also, the changes of ownership (and motivations) between Berkeley/Osterhout, Sun, and Scriptics were muddled... particularly given the rapid ascendancy of Java and JavaScript. (Both of which did a good job of supplanting Tcl in it's non-GUI roles.)
While I don't think the string-oriented nature of the language did it any favors, I also think it illustrates one of the problems with language design. The language had some great capabilities (because it was so heavily based on strings) but I don't think many people ever truly understood the significance enough for it to really become a selling point. Tcl suffered the downside of the weird syntax, but realized none of the benefits it got from having the weird syntax. (A lot like Lisp, as you say.)
In that context, Tcl/Tk was magical... you could put together a window with a button and an event handler inside of five lines of code. (And it would look pretty good when you were done.) If you weren't hung up on drag and drop UI building, it was arguably a better way to assemble UI components than VisualBASIC. I spent a year or two doing research UI development in Tcl and loved the tool chain.
On the other hand, Tcl got swamped with a number of forces that conspired against it in the long run. In some ways, Tk was a deficit, as good as it was... I think it tended to pigeonhole the language a bit more than was fair. Also, the changes of ownership (and motivations) between Berkeley/Osterhout, Sun, and Scriptics were muddled... particularly given the rapid ascendancy of Java and JavaScript. (Both of which did a good job of supplanting Tcl in it's non-GUI roles.)
While I don't think the string-oriented nature of the language did it any favors, I also think it illustrates one of the problems with language design. The language had some great capabilities (because it was so heavily based on strings) but I don't think many people ever truly understood the significance enough for it to really become a selling point. Tcl suffered the downside of the weird syntax, but realized none of the benefits it got from having the weird syntax. (A lot like Lisp, as you say.)