I recently started learning Tcl for the heck of it and am surprised by what a nice little language it is and that it doesn't get more publicity. It's true that it's not great for working with numbers or complex data structures, but it's a really nice language for "plumbing", and is still in active development. The last few releases have added support for tail-call recursion, "coroutines", and native dictionaries. It's had a bytecode compiler for like 20 years, so it's not as slow as it used to be.
As far as complaints about the syntax being weird: It's far more consistent than Algol descendants in that everything is a string, much like everything in Lisp is a list. You don't have to learn a bunch of different syntactic constructs, everything is a string, and every string is a space-delimited list, and can be interpreted as a command. The hardest part of the language is the quoting rules, which the documentation affectionately refers to as "quoting hell". Once you wrap your head around that, everything becomes clear. The standard library is pretty easy to learn, and the documentation is good.
As far as complaints about the syntax being weird: It's far more consistent than Algol descendants in that everything is a string, much like everything in Lisp is a list. You don't have to learn a bunch of different syntactic constructs, everything is a string, and every string is a space-delimited list, and can be interpreted as a command. The hardest part of the language is the quoting rules, which the documentation affectionately refers to as "quoting hell". Once you wrap your head around that, everything becomes clear. The standard library is pretty easy to learn, and the documentation is good.
Check it out.