Scripting languages

Scripting languages are not new, although it's likely that the years to come will see both increased use of those we know today and the birth of other languages of this type.

The scripting languages closest to programming languages (some of which have become programming languages) are built on principles derived for the most part from concepts introduced by the Lisp language in the late 1970s.

One of the main reasons for the craze for these languages is that they have become viable in terms of performance, thanks to the rapid evolution of computer hardware, in terms of memory capacity and processing speed; the other major reason is the ever-increasing use of the Internet, which makes computer applications increasingly "communicative", both between computer components and between people: scripting languages have been invented to meet these new needs.

Most of the languages used in industrial applications have their origins in the academic world, where they have proved their worth over the last fifteen years or so, whether as scripting languages for operating systems (Unix shell, Perl, Python) or as media for creating graphical interfaces (Tcl/Tk). Other, more recent languages, such as JavaScript or VBScript, were born with the Internet and the development of the Web (they are often adaptations of various existing languages, scripting languages or not).

The main attraction of these languages is probably their ease of use, due to their high – level, their expressive power – and their ease of use: you enter commands on the keyboard or directly execute programs stored in files, and you immediately see the results.

These languages are not designed for the same applications as programming languages, even if in some cases the two types of language are interchangeable: scripting languages are designed to combine software components, themselves created in programming languages.

We have chosen to present here the most widely used scripting languages, in their preferred fields: system commands, component composition, web programming. There are many others, either more confidential – specific to certain hardware manufacturers – or linked to machine architectures, or specialized in certain applications; we refer the reader to the various information available, either from the companies that distribute them, or on the web.