Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Searching for the Best Scripting Language

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the less-filling!-tastes-great! dept.

prostoalex writes "Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode. sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points they were essentially tied for first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the 'Hello world' examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development."

6 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Nobody ever looks at Io or REXX... by Dimwit · · Score: 5, Informative

    Two languages missing are:

    Io, which is an awesome, prototype-based scripting language that's super-easy to embed in C applications, and has an incredibly simple and consistent syntax.

    REXX (Regina's just one implementation). REXX makes it incredibly easy to do system scripting, with powerful string-manipulation and I/O redirection.

    Another one's ficl, which is basically an embedable Forth interpreter. (To all you young geeks out there - LEARN FORTH. You may never need to write a line of it ever in your life, but you'll learn a hell of a lot about how computers work. Trust me on this.)

    --
    ...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
  2. Re:Biased by jelle · · Score: 5, Informative

    One-letter class names? Is he nuts? That guy never had to maintain code I guess...

    --
    --- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
  3. I heard someone is looking for Ruby? :-) by rolling_bits · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check out my site for some Ruby GUI stuff:
    (the gotcha is it's mostly in Portuguese. So jump to the "Exemplos Meus" (My Examples) section. Or use babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com)
    http://geocities.com/canalruby

    Hey, web stuff is easy with Ruby as well. But I don't have such examples for you. You have to get a taste of Ruby to find about its web capabilities. I Know IOWA has an example:
    http://enigo.com/projects/iowa/index.html

    Further enlightening at:
    http://www.ruby-doc.com
    http://www.rubyforge.org
    http://raa.ruby-lang.org

    You know, once you get addicted, there is no going back! :-)

  4. Re:vbscript by chromatic · · Score: 5, Informative
    PERLScript (why do people not spell it like an acronym any more?)

    It never was an acronym. See an explanation of Perl's name for an explanation of the backronym.

    --
    how to invest, a novice's guide
  5. By features instead of by language by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Informative

    In a similar vain, I wrote up a scripting language comparison document, but focused more on features rather than particular languages. Comparison Link. I describe the various feature options, and then weigh the pro's and con's of each.

    After years of debating language features, I generally conclude that a lot of it is subjective. No language will ever satisfy everybody.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  6. Re:The eternal quest... by DavidNWelton · · Score: 5, Informative

    My friend Salvatore and I did a similar site, although we haven't added so many languages and tests, and are more focused on benchmarking. It's available at: scutigena.sf.net

    --
    http://www.welton.it/davidw/