On 25/06/2013 03:24, rusi wrote:
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
And convenience for the programmer.
"""Manipulating long texts using variable-length strings? Yes, I know
it's inefficient, but it's still faster than doing it by hand!"""
- 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
Automating tasks, e.g. controlling other applications and stringing
together tasks that you would otherwise be doing by hand.
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