Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Alexander Schmolck]

"Donn Cave" <donn at drizzle.com> writes:

> Quoth Alexander Schmolck <a.schmolck at gmail.com>:
> | "Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:
> ...
> |> the only even remotely formal definition I've ever seen is "language with
> |> designed to script an existing application, with limited support for handling
> |> its own state". 
> |
> |> Early Tcl and JavaScript are scripting languages, Python is not.
> |
> | Right. Which shows that by this definition scripting language is not a
> | meaningful and useful concept. No one will understand you correctly when you
> | refer to "scripting language" and mean only something like the above -- and
> | unless you spend a lot of your time talking about early tcl and early
> | javascript I doubt you'd need a word for it, either.
> 
> Oddly enough, that's what I understand it to mean, too, so you can't
> strictly say "no one".

Really? If someone talked about scripting languages without further
qualifications and much context would you automatically take that to exclude
modern Javascript, modern Tcl and python, perl, ruby etc.?

Or would you just think to yourself 'Ah, probably again someone who uses
"scripting language" imprecisely or incorectly'?

In pretty much any case I can think of all somewhat prominent languages even
those that started out purely in the context of scripting one particular
application (such as arguably javascript, although that sense of scripting is
definitely again distinct from the sense "providing application customization
and extension by users") by now have ursurped other tasks and don't fall
strictly under the given definition anymore. So my impression is that since
"scripting languages" as above would only refer to a very obscure set of
programming languages, almost no one uses the term strictly in that way.

This meaning can always be expressed by "application (specific) scripting
language" -- but what would you use to refer to "perl, python, ruby et al"?

> On the other hand, I think it's obvious that a language like Python could
> be used for scripting, without having been specifically designed for it as
> described above.  


Interviewer: "Why did you create Python in the first place?"
 
Guido: "We wanted Amoeba to be as useful as Unix for our daily work, but it was
        lacking a scripting language. So I set out to design my own."

So Guido certainly designed it as a "scripting language", but since the term
is so vague, he might 


> There's an ambiguity in the phrase, out of context - I can say "Python can
> serve as a scripting language for some applications", but not "Python is a
> scripting language!", since its place in the taxonomy of languages would be
> somewhere else.

I definitely agree that scripting language is rather ambiguous.

'as