Scripting Language

Noun · Development · Origin: 1975

Definitions

  1. A programming language designed to orchestrate other programs and automate tasks, historically interpreted, dynamically typed, and optimised for programmer time over machine time. The category began with shell languages that glued Unix utilities together and expanded through awk, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. The distinction from 'real' programming languages was always more sociological than technical and has largely dissolved: modern scripting languages carry JIT compilers, static type checking, and production workloads at enormous scale, while the term itself now often signals the intended use of a program rather than any property of the language.