XOTclIDE does not try to invent “yet another way” to write computer programs. Rather it is a synthesis of three streams - Tcl, XOTcl and Smalltalk - in the computer world, along with the author's experience. Indeed XOTclIDE is a Smalltalk like IDE programmed in Tcl/XOTcl. What are the main ideas taken from these streams?
TCL - is the base programming language and platform for this system. Flexible string oriented interpreter allows implementing many ideas in a short time. TCL is widely used, has many additional libraries, offers a GUI Toolkit (TK) and supports many platforms.
XOTcl - enables flexible object-oriented language support for Tcl. Allows programing and structuring large application, and allows reuse of code in an object oriented manner. The implementation of XOTcl in C brings reasonable performance.
Smalltalk - the model for a big IDE. How to work with it and use all advantages of interpreted language and dynamic/interactive programming. It was also the reference system for some basic programming practices and tools (Debugger, Version Control, Unit Tests, Object inspector, Browsers). Although Smalltalk lost popularity several years ago it has influenced many programming languages (C++, Java, C#) and IDEs so the concepts will be familiar to many programmers.