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Novel Thoughts on Scripting and Languages

James Huang judoscript at hotmail.com
Fri Jan 10 00:31:21 EST 2003 
grante at visi.com (Grant Edwards) wrote in message news:<3e1de2b7$0$25512$a1866201 at newsreader.visi.com>...
> In article <52719db8.0301082259.535824a4 at posting.google.com>, James Huang wrote:
> 
> > Allow me to give my non-scientific definition of scripting language:
> > 
> > Scripting (in programming sense)
> >================================
> > is to do things easily, intuitively, obviously, and accurately, so
> > much so that when another person (with the same domain knowledge) sees
> > a chunk of code, he immediately understands it without even a hint of
> > reasoning (ideally).
> 
> I don't think that's a common definition of "scripting". I'd
> say that what you stated above is (or should be) a goal for any
> programming language of any type.

You are serious?

> 
> I would define scripting as writing a program to automate a
> repetative task that might normally done manually (via a series
> of GUI point and click operations or a series of manually
> entered shell commands).

Automation is certainly a scripting activity. Scripting (as Terry
Hancock pointed, perhaps years agon) is a matter of usage. When one
wants to do something quickly, one needs [my definition]; otherwise,
to make library most re-usable, APIs have to be low-level, with
fine-granularity and that leads to something totally in the opposite
direction. Nothing wrong of course, but they are not good for
scripting. Java APIs is not much different, BTW.
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