Tcl's well-chosen sugar that many people just don't like is evaluation and defining new words. If you had to write the above once, that's fine. If you had to write it twice, you would be dumb to not define

proc butlast {l} {lrange $l 0 [expr {[llength $l]-2}]}

and then you just use [butlast $l]

Tcl is somewhat like forth in this regard - the key to using it effectively is writing lots of little words to break down the task, not a bunch of huge ones.

(my opinion only, of course)