[npsimons]

As a working programmer and a bit of a language geek, a few years ago I decided to try to get as many programming languages as possible installed on my dev machines. From this, I eventually tried to get as many of them "scriptable" as possible, creating at a bare minimum a "Hello, world!" template that could be run from the command line. I like having options, or a bare minimum, having things around to play with/learn when I've got down time.

I remember something in "Mythical Man-Month" that extolled the virtues of scripting programming for concept exploration, and I've often felt this is one of the major advantages traditionally scriptable languages have over compiled. Once you can run a program without compiling it, iteration tends to go faster.

So sure, some languages require more boilerplate to get started than others, but I've got templates for that, and I happily scripted almost all the exercises in "Thinking in C++" because it just made working them out faster, even in emacs where I can bind the compile key to any command I can dream of.