Not TCL, but my Perl war story was I worked for a printer company. They had somehow gotten someone to record ink cartridge information into external data files. INI files to be precise, one INI per record.
They were literally spending 9 weeks opening about 15,000 INI files and pasting them into an Excel spreadsheet manually.
I was rather silly and made the claim that Perl was designed for this sort of thing, they challenged me and I felt my honour was at stake, so I whipped up a program to do it for them one night and brought it in the next day. I ran it on the INI files, and in about 20 seconds it had put all the data into a CSV file.
They were astounded that I had taken 9 weeks of tedious, error prone data entry and processed it in less than a minute. I just figured it was an interesting thing to do, and told them to keep it quiet as this was really outside my area, but they made me employee of the quarter anyway.
Visual is more natural, simple and rich way of cognition for human brain than symbolic expressions, there's nothing wrong with it. What's somewhat pity is the fact all the attempts to create any 'visual programming' tools failed miserably. Although we could easily imagine a tool that allows to point a field in any formatted text like INI file, and point the column in Excel where the values should be inserted, and automatically build the regular expression to parse the bunch of such files - that's not visual programming in any way of course, but if such a tool could be extensible enough, and extensible by the same visual way, I don't know but maybe some significant part of users should be interested enough.
They were literally spending 9 weeks opening about 15,000 INI files and pasting them into an Excel spreadsheet manually.
I was rather silly and made the claim that Perl was designed for this sort of thing, they challenged me and I felt my honour was at stake, so I whipped up a program to do it for them one night and brought it in the next day. I ran it on the INI files, and in about 20 seconds it had put all the data into a CSV file.
They were astounded that I had taken 9 weeks of tedious, error prone data entry and processed it in less than a minute. I just figured it was an interesting thing to do, and told them to keep it quiet as this was really outside my area, but they made me employee of the quarter anyway.