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Discussion on: Top 5 Programming Languages Every Software Developer Should Learn

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thepeoplesbourgeois profile image
Josh

Out of curiosity, what do you feel classifies Python as a scripting language, and what kinds of languages are the others on this list?

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

Well, Python has come a long way from a scripting language, but I started using that for automating tasks. It classifies as a scripting language because you don't need to compile them, just write code in a script and you are done. It's great for automating simple housekeeping and other tasks.

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thepeoplesbourgeois profile image
Josh • Edited

Hmm... I'm curious about where to draw the dividing line between scripting and non-scripting languages now. Erlang and Elixir can both be run within an interpreter, but officially have a compilation phase where the source is converted to bytecode for the BEAM virtual machine; Ruby has existed as an interpreted language for most of its lifetime, but now ships with an optional JIT-compiler, and Java has had the ability to be JIT-compiled afaik since version 1.7. If there were ever a moment when the Java VM could skip the compilation phase altogether, I wonder if it would then be a "scripting" language, or if it's it feeling as if it runs in an interpreter is already sufficient to consider it a scripting language. Conversely, assuming that Ruby 3 will always at least be JIT-compiled, I wonder if it will then graduate to no longer being a scripting language.

I had sort of considered any language where engineers are capable of building structured, multi-file and multi-module applications as being at least multipurpose, if not general purpose, languages, while languages incapable of supporting structured applications (e.g. bash, awk, perl) as scripting languages. This gives me something to think about... thank you