I used it a few times, mainly because of Freewrap. With very little code I was able to write a Windows app with GUI that I could distribute easily as an executable:
- A backup app for an online sales application (inputs items and spits out a file);
- An app to fix files in a buggy POS for a large retail chain (this might have been used in thousands of machines, I can't recall the details now);
- A small app to copy Forms/Reports to the server, fire compilation, and push the new file to git;
- A wrapper for gs to help a media department easily join many PDFs into one file.
I don't know if you'll see this, since it was a couple days ago, and I've been reviewing multiple posts. I think what you describe is exactly what got me into programming (beyond a hobby, which was brought on by BASIC games in the 80's), but also what really hooked me into writing code for a living.
These all seem like a huge deal, unless you don't understand business and their needs. I can easily see how all four solutions could provide enormous value. For myself, these are the types of things that I got involved in programming professionally for. I think it's impressive that you were able to take a language like Tcl (not traditionally taught in university), and able to find a useful library to implement your logic.
Beyond BASIC games in the very early 80's, Visual Basic and the "hacking" tools for AOL, were a huge inspiration for myself. I dipped my toes into some weird libraries to solve some issues, that are still used today, in companies that you would never expect to be using something so simple and crude, but sturdy. Crash out with a useful message if something is wrong, do nothing on failure. Not for regular consumers, but perfect for internal staff that load data into a database, and can understand "row X is not compatible with this data type", or "This transformation rule fails because X occurred," being some rule that can't be expressed through SQL where the data is stored (but was able to be imported).
This reminds me of something I wrote in Tcl at my previous employer - a little utility that could decode an in-house data format and display it in an understandable way. Quite a few other people found it useful for debugging issues.
