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by t43562 816 days ago
Scripts are usually no better than they have to be - they're not the main purpose of the system. Scripting languages handle all sorts of issues that take pages of code in other languages so they are the easiest way to do what you need and easy wins.

IMO some languages like C/C++ cry out for an embedded scripting language so that you don't write the basic, one off, performance insensitive parts of your code in a "hard" language. This is taking it the other way around - suggesting that as much as possible of your "main project" should be in a scripting language so that you're not wasting "hard" development cycles on areas that don't need it.

1 comments

>pages of code

Code reuse.

The benefits of hard language: 1) I now can do interesting things like text parsing, 2) my scripts are cross platform, 3) I don't need to figure out how to deploy python everywhere in advance or on demand, 4) if the user has python, I don't need to tell him I don't like his python version and he must install a different OS, 5) I don't have python as an extra dependency, 6) I can reuse my main code in my scripts, 7) scripts are written in a language with a decent type system.

One small counter I have is that most software development has dependencies anyhow - and with compiled languages this is quite a pain in the arse to manage. So installing tcl or lua or python or ruby or perl is just a normal problem amongst other problems.

If you want type systems everywhere then I think that's another debate. That is really a total rejection of almost all scripting languages for all purposes.