*WARNING* READ THIS CAREFULY!

Lurkers: if your not going to comment, atleast vote :p tons of views and 14 votes.

I've seen this disscused many times in many IRC rooms and was wondering what the opinion of this forum was. PLEASE no slandering from either side. If you have a disagreement put your answer in an intelligable form. I would also appreciate, as i'm shure the moderators would, that no one attacks another personaly. No calling one another "fools", "idiots", etc. This is intended for you to present your argument for one side or the other or both, and then back it up. Not just say it is or isn't because you said so. This DOES NOT apply to just one scripting language but to all. What i'm gona provide is what i've seen in general in such disscusions amongst scripters and coders.

Is scripting realy programming:

Yay:
Scripting is programming due to the fact that they share the same characteristics. For example you must declare variables, you have if/else statements etc.

Nay:
Scripting is NOT programming because what makes programming different is that it requires a compiler.

Where this debate goes is up to you. I stress again, PLEASE refrain from insults, personal attacks and outright childishness. Keep this on an intellectual level as much as possible.

To the moderators:
I would appreciate it if you could remove such negative comments as i've listed above. If you dont wish to thats fine, no hard feelings about it.

Thanks to all and ejoy.

Would be nice to specify two answers at once: "Yay" plus "Doesn't concern me."

As far as I can tell, the only reason this debate exists is because some confused bored 13-year olds look for social acceptance by proclaiming their programming skills as mIRC script writers. And other bored people want to have a coherent reason to put them down.

Cleary some programming is much more skilled and involved than others, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're writing original material of some kind you're a programmer. Doesn't matter whether it's PostScript, bash, qbasic, or 6502 assembly.

So, yes, but nobody should be so caught up on it.

Yay as in yes you believe that Scripting is the same as programming.
Doesn't concer me, well that should be self explanitory.

FYI, the people i was talking to i know from college, so its not some 13 year old situation. Why people believe its always 10-16 year olds doing this i dont know. There are those out there in the professional world that debate this subject so please no more 13 year old stuff.

I'm just explaining where I've seen the debate crop up before. I didn't even read your post carefully enough before replying to see that you mentioned IRC.

I'm willing to defend an irc script as a program, just as I'm willing to defend a "hello world" C program as... a program. Neither is impressive though, which I think is what the debate is truly about. And that's why the debate quickly crosses into "who cares" territory.

Compiled vs. interpreted is a complete red herring, and IMO an artificial excuse used to either denigrate or pump up one particular approach over another. I don't think it's necessary to get into technical reasons why the distinction is so artificial, because most people are willing to reconsider when they are told that you CAN compile perl - or qbasic, for that matter - and contrary to popular belief, there are C interpreters.

Scripting is scripting, programming is programming.

To consider something truly a programming language it has to allow for at least a certain amount of CS theory stuff to be applied. Data structures, algorithms, things of this nature.

Scripting is very useful, but it sure isn't programming. Same goes for markup languages like HTML in my opinion as well. That isn't programming, that is formatting output/input

Anyway, if you walk into a job interview for a programming job and they ask you what languages you have experience in and you say "Bash scripts and HTML" they will laugh at your expense as soon as you leave... believe me, I have been in the room when it happened.

Now if you said "Bash scripts, HTML, and <insert programming language like C, C++, python, Java here>" we might be inclined to think you are employable.

Markup isn't programming for the reason you give (it's formatting), but you didn't give any reason why "scripting" wouldn't qualify: I don't know off the top of my head of any "scripting language" that lacks the concept of data structures, let alone algorithms. Also, most commonly-used scripting languages are Turing-complete.

I would also add that "script" is a vague term that doesn't help out the "programming-or-not" debate at all. You can translate any algorithm from bash to C to postscript to Java, because they're all turing-complete. (bash lacks an EASY way to make system calls and library calls, but this is superficial, and could actually be implemented by someone who doesn't mind doing things the VERY HARD way. and clearly the use or non-use of system calls and libraries don't define whether you're programming or not, since these things actually INSULATE the programmer from the algorithms and hardware!)

i say yeah.

it still uses the same rules as a compiled language would and as someone pointed out on another related thread. java wouldnt qualify as a programming lanuage either since the .class files have to refer to an interpretor.

We can spilt stuff up into too many classifications. if you can write programs in a language that requires compiling before you can run them then you can generally write scripts in a language that doesnt and vice versa. so the answer is yes you are programming if you are writing a script.

i think. obviously im not unopposed.

Have fun.
Ben.

I guess I'll concede that many scripting languages these days have a lot of features. Maybe I'll even concede it is programming on some level.

But it certainly isn't serious programming. You wouldn't build a large application in a scripting language. You can't build low level kernel stuff in a scripting language (course you can't build one in java either..). Scripting languages are still much more limited then languages like C, C++, Java, or Python.

Most don't support building libraries. Many don't support some of the advanced data structures.

A lot of the skills may be the same, but if all you can do is write scripts and don't know any traditional programming languages I can guarantee you great difficulty getting employed based on that skill.

Anyway, I can see this getting ugly, and I don't want to turn it into a flame fest.

So this is my opinion, take it or leave it. You are certainly entitled to your own, even if it is wrong (j/k).

You'd prefer not to build a large, complicated application in assembly either, but that doesn't necessarily make it any less serious than C++Python is normally interpreted; so is perl and it offers libraries and OO (if that even matters). I fail to see how the distinction is anything but arbitrary. Again it is coming down to which tends to be used for more "impressive" applications.

I could easily re-write many of my startup scripts in C, and some people actually do this for at least some scripts to get a significant boot-time speedup. Even though the code is doing the exact same thing, is it still a "startup script" or not? This begins to get into why I think the whole debate is so utterly pointless. Apparently, a "script" is any program that is too unimpressive to be taken seriously by "real programmers." If impressiveness is so important, why not just call them "unimpressive programs"?

how do the yays and nays feel about PHP? its a pretty powerful scripting language.

Shell scripts and batch files have always been a way to do some programming without knowing a programing language.
Unless you are writing machine code it is a argument about semantics. Compiler or no compiler is just an argument. Putting a formatted set of commands in a certain order to attain a certain result is what is the same. "Real" programming languages do offer more options and take more knowledge, in my belief. But an excellent batch or shell scripter renders moot the need for some programs.
I am a terrible second rate hack shell scripter.
I managed to create a number of shell scripts that have menu interfaces (all console), call a text editor with a preformatted form, cat previously entered information into an html document to be viewed in links (console web browser), pull up a console file manager to edit or delete a file, search with grep in a preformatted manor in specific directories, copy files to a floppy by entering the date of the document (mounting and unmounting is handled by the script), basically it does what I want by using available software tools. The people that use it call it a program, it seems like one connected thing to them. I correct that definition with anyone that could follow the disclaimer.
Draw the lines where you want. Shell scripts and batch files are a type of programing.

You don't use a compiler for Python. I think the distinction should be not in scripting programming, but in compiled programming and interpreted programming, as to there is more REAL debate there. Or in uses, I have in my website a collection of tutorials, divided into three sections: Computer Programming; Web Programming (including scripting languages and markup languages) and Database Programming (that which uses the structured query language).

As powerful as it may be, by using it are you truely programming? I'm not one way or the other, but i'd like to hear a more indepth opinion if you have one.

Thanks to all for keeping this an intellectual discusion.

Bullshit. Wanna bet? Look at Zope. Written entirely in Python, and it's a very large application.

Do you know what you are talking about? Python is an interpreted language (hell, so is Java to a degree), how else are you going to differentiate scripting languages from "real" languages?

You better define "scripting languges" before you get a heap of crap thrown at you.

And you have yet to explain the different skillsets possessed by the two.

Any language that is Turing complete is considered a programming language in my book, and anyone who can design solutions to problems in said language is a programmer in my book. As most scripting languages that I've ever seen are Turing complete, then yes, scripting is most definitely programming.