Why Do People Like Scripting Languages?

As much as the title seems to suggest one of my rants, this is actually a valid question along with a bit of my own pondering. Scripting languages seem to be the flavor of the month these days and I’m not really sure why. I’ve got nothing against scripting languages but I don’t see why they should be considered the be all and end all solution that people seem to think they are. Interestingly, when I first seriously got into programming, it was using HyperCard and there was a constant barrage of insults coming from the “real programmers” about these hobbyists using scripting languages. More than ten years later and all of a sudden you’re just not groovy (pardon the pun) if you’re not using a scripting language. I love being able to write a quick perl script to munge a text file in an odd format or to run through the Xalan codebase and change the package so that it doesn’t conflict with the version in the JRE. Our support auto-responder at work is a cool little perl script that I wrote to take the incoming (evil MS HTML formatted email) that comes from the web form, parse it, log the details in our tracking system and fire back an email to the user with the tracking number. Works a charm. It would be a real pain to write that stuff in anything but perl because of perl’s awesome support for text parsing and abundant if unwieldy and occasionally unreliable libraries in CPAN. I’ve also written a major business system in perl with database interaction, workflow and all that jazz. It worked well but it was certainly no easier to do it in perl than Java or most likely C given appropriate libraries. I wouldn’t consider C an option unless performance was absolutely critical for server systems however because it leaves open the risk of buffer overruns and similar security holes that can be completely eliminated automatically by most other languages. Even if speed were critical I’d recommend buying faster hardware or using a distributed system before writing a server in C. I’ve also written little scripts and smallish sites in PHP. It’s a nice language that I enjoy using but again I don’t see anything hugely wonderful about it. Everyone seems to be very python oriented these days and I must admit to having almost no knowledge of the language but from the code I have tried to modify in python I really don’t see any reason to be overly excited about it. Again, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong with it, but I don’t see why it would be so much better than C, Java, Visual Basic, C# etc. I also use JavaScript a lot at work and use it as a full programming language, not just to do roll over graphics. It can do some cool things but the resulting code is far from easily maintainable and again, I don’t see the advantage other than it’s the only option for code-in-a-browser when working cross-browser. The most common reason I hear people giving for why they like scripting languages is because they “just flow better”. I just don’t buy that. I grew up on scripting languages and I just don’t find that they flow any better than any other languages. They do tend to be easier to learn because you get to ignore most of the rules of good programming while you learn (think perl without the use strict directive). If you want to write good code though, you should put that use strict line back in and pay attention to all those little details that make initial coding harder but maintainability easier. Once you’re thinking about all those little things I find scripting has the same feel as “programming”. So am I abnormal or am I just missing something? Maybe it’s both….