Python development tools

[rusi]

On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 4:41:22 AM UTC+5:30, Ben Finney wrote:
> rusi  writes:
> > I dont however think that the two philosophies are the same. See
> > http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html
> 
> That essay constrasts “scripting” versus “system programming”, a useful
> (though terminologically confusing) distinction.
> 
> It's a mistake to think that essay contrasts “scripting“ versus
> “programming”. But the essay never justifies its aversion to
> “programming” as a term for what it's describing, so that mistake is
> easy to make.

The essay is 15 years old. So a bit dated. Referred to it as it conveys the sense/philosophy of scripting.

> 
> > On Monday, June 24, 2013 11:50:38 AM UTC+5:30, Ben Finney wrote:
> > > Any time someone has shown me a “Python script”, I don't see how
> > > it's different from what I'd call a “Python program”. So I just
> > > mentally replace “scripting with “programming”.
> >
> > If you are saying that python spans the scripting to programming
> > spectrum exceptionally well, I agree. 
> 
> I'm saying that “scripting” is a complete subset of “programming”, so
> it's nonsense to talk about “the scripting-to-programming spectrum”.
> 
> Scripting is, always, programming. Scripts are, always, programs. (But
> not vice-versa; I do acknowledge there is more to programming than
> scripting.) I say this because anything anyone has said to me about the
> former is always something included already by the latter.
> 
> So I don't see much need for treating scripts as somehow distinct from
> programs, or scripting as somehow distinct from programming. Whenever
> you're doing the former, you're doing the latter by definition.
> 

My personal associations with the word 'scripting'

- Cavalier attitude towards efficiency
- No interest (and maybe some scorn) towards over-engineering (hence OOP)
- Heavy use of regular expressions, also sophistication of the command-line args
- A sense (maybe vague) of being glue more than computation, eg. a bash script is almost certain to invoke something other than builtins alone and is more likely to invoke a non-bash script than a bash script.  For a C program that likelihood is the other way round.  For python it could be either