Tcl was... is a fantastic language for doing web development. Its flexible nature made it really good for doing template/PHP type stuff, and being pretty string friendly, you had a lot of what you needed out of the box.
Thanks for creating Rivet! I use it for several separate pieces of interactive functionality on my home server, the way some may use PHP. The API is simple enough, and if you already know Tcl it doesn't take you long to get started. I like how easy it is to add file uploading to an existing form with ::rivet::upload.
> Tcl was... is a fantastic language for doing web development.
Except for JSON. You can't round-trip JSON through Tcl because dicts are lists are strings. There are solutions out there (https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/JSON), I even wrote a few of them, but in the end there is a fundamental impedance mismatch. It gets in the way of emitting JSON from quick hacks or the REPL because you essentially need an explicit schema.
For text-based templates, Tcl is good. I have written code to generate CSS in Tcl and loved how well the language fit the task.
(I found this out for CSS when I contributed a responsive stylesheet for https://www.tcl-lang.org/. I wanted a CSS preprocessor to avoid repetition, and one that would never break, at least not before Tcl did. I think it worked well. The template uses subst and some variables. It is Tcl 9-ready. :-) I recommend trying it if you do web development in Tcl.)
It did less than AOLserver, but was also very lightweight and easy to integrate with Apache.
For a long time, https://flightaware.com/ used Rivet under the hood.
Tcl was... is a fantastic language for doing web development. Its flexible nature made it really good for doing template/PHP type stuff, and being pretty string friendly, you had a lot of what you needed out of the box.