[jerf]

Curious what the author is thinking of when calling this a "scripting language"? I personally don't have much trouble imagining a strongly-typed scripting language, but that definitely goes against the flow of the past couple of decades. Is it that it is garbage collected? That's about all I can see that would make this immediately obviously a "scripting language". It doesn't seem like it ought to be intrinsically as slow as what usually gets called a "scripting language".

To be clear, this is an honest question, and possibly something the author should consider answering, intended as feedback, not a criticism. I'm open to it. I'm also curious and I'm sure I'm not the only one. (Either way I definitely would suggest mentioning if it's garbage collected or not. It's an important point.)

[giann]

Author here. A few points make buzz a “scripting language” in my view: - runs in a VM - garbage collected - high level - “simple” meaning there’s only a handful of concepts to understand to use it

It’s true that we’re not used to scripting languages having a type system. But its a trend that is catching on: python has types, php too and typescript is at its peak in popularity to name a few.

[throwawaymaths]

Actually what made me not consider this a "real" scripting language is not any of those things but rather the existence of a non-optional entry point function. Scripting languages typically read code from top of file to bottom to decide what to execute

[giann]

It’s really hard (impossible?) to have a type system with user defined types and do without a declarative top level.

[throwawaymaths]

I think by the non-soft bits (I don't know what simple means) of your definition, Erlang, java, c#, go would be considered "scripting languages", which I think would be a hard sell.

Anyways I don't mean to take away from your work;. It looks very cool.

[lll-o-lll]

Multiple passes?

[PartiallyTyped]

I don’t want to be that person but technically python is a strongly typed scripting language as it has no type coercion but instead uses structural typing.

[fzzzy]

You might be thinking about the distinction between statically typed and dynamically typed languages. There are plenty of strongly typed scripting languages. Python is strongly typed; JavaScript is weakly typed.

[3a2d29]

Reading this comment, I realized I always thought:

Scripting == interpreted

Is that not the case?

[throwawaymaths]

In my mind scripting means what it is: You read a file like a script from top to bottom and run it. Declarations are actually instructions for a "declarer routine". There's usually no predefined entry point function, and if there is one it's optional.

Compiled/interpreted is kind of besides the point.

Julia (compiled, btw), ruby, python, php, perl, bash, JavaScript thus are all scripting languages.

Java, c, c#, go, f# rust, zig, Erlang, some flavors of lisp, node-style javascript, are not.

There are some corner cases. I consider elixir, for example to be a scripting language for it's own compiler which produces a very much non-scripted result.