Novel Thoughts on Scripting and Languages

[Dave Brueck]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, James Huang wrote:

> > If that's your definiton, all programming languages of which
> > I'm aware are "scripting languages".  At least under Linux,
> > issuing "OS commands"  is a standard library function accessible
> > to all languages.  C and assembly language can both use the
> > exact same system() or exec calls that Python and Perl do.
>
> Gee... Anyway, this is what I call scripting:
>
>    copy '*.java, *.jj' except '*Test*' in '~/src/'
>         recursive echo
>         to '~/archive/today';
>
>    copy '*.java, *.jj' except '*Test*' in '~/src/'
>         recursive echo
>         into '~/archive/today_src.jar';
>
> This is programming, "scriptingly":
>
>    do 'http://www.google.com' as sgml
>    {
>    <a>:   println '<a>   link: ', $_.href;
>    <img>: println '<img> link: ', $_.src;
>    }
>
> This is pure programming:
>
>    for i from 1 to 10 {
>      println i;
>    }

Care to elaborate? From the above it seems that, according to your
definition, the difference between scripting and programming is purely
syntactic. Hmm... admittedly this IS a "novel thought on scripting
languages", but probably not in the sense you were shooting for. IOW, it
looks like your idea of scripting is closer to "domain-specific syntax" or
something, in which case SQL would be a scripting language, right? (if
not, why not?)

Part of my problem is that it's common to use Python for tasks that
traditionally fall under programming (applications development, system
programming, etc.) as well as tasks that traditionally fall under
scripting (the equivalent of one-off scripts that you could also write in
bash, or things called in cron jobs) to the point that the distinction
between the two has blurred somewhat because in both cases (1) we use the
same development tools, (2) we don't do any compiling/linking or other
prepare-to-use step, and (3) we have full access to whatever resources
(APIs, libraries, shells) we need.

So what do consider to be scripting versus programming and in what way
does it matter? If Judoscript is simply a way to do Java stuff without
having to go through an explicit compile step, then cool, more power to
you. But if, as your site implies, there is additional value there that
might be useful to me (above and beyond Python and similar languages),
then help me understand what it is (note that simply asserting "it's
better!" doesn't really help).

Thanks,
-Dave