Why?

Does the world really need another programming language? Probably not for most people but it was useful for us and might be useful for you if you are still using Tcl (or Tcl/Tk) but wish it had a more C-like syntax.

Why base it on Tcl when there are more modern systems?

We (BitKeeper folks) did our GUI interfaces in Tcl/Tk years ago because it meant we could have one gui person and get the same gui tools on Windows, Mac, Unix, and Linux. Yes, somewhat clunky (less so over the years), but as a small start up it was great not having to have a developer for each platform, both for initial coding and for ongoing maintenance. And we've found you can make Tk look quite decent if you try.

While some of us could switch from C to Tcl easily, our pointy-haired boss could not, he's mostly C and would lose about a half a day to get back into Tcl. Things like:

set x [expr {[lindex $red $i] - [lindex $blue [lindex $green $i]]}]

when it could have been

x = red[i] - blue[green[i]]

tended to trip him up. Which was a problem since he wrote the initial versions of the GUI tools.

He did what every crazy boss does, he funded a programming language.

The goal was to be so like C that there was no hiccup going from C to Little, while still being able to access all of the Tcl environment (there is a lot of useful code there). Success was realized when one of our engineers, who is not a Little fan, fixed a bug in a patch that flew by in email without realizing it was Little instead of C.

We started it in 2006, kept promising to open source it, here it finally is! We hope you like it, feel free to pop over to the Community section and join the conversation.