alt Hacker NewsBack in the 2000's I was on a startup whose main language was Tcl, and we would write C extensions for any performance critical command.
The experience lead me to avoid any language without JIT or AOT, unless forced upon me.
Hence why I have used Python since version 1.6 only for OS scripting tasks.
I don’t know the timeline off-hand but I’m guessing this was before Tcl 8, at a time when everything in Tcl was a string not only logically, but also in the actual VM? There’s a whole chasm of implementation tradeoffs between that and a straight-up JIT.