Searching for the Best Scripting Language

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."

Comments

good but recognized?

[2057]

Ruby came in second, now lets say i put Ruby on my resume....how much respect will that get? while it was useful to rank the scripts to the author for whatever purpose(prove his point). It is still useless because there is a lack of implentation of 90% of these scripting languages...ergo this changes nothing..my resume is still filled with useless knowledge which won't help me win on jeopardy

Re:good but recognized?

[archen]

That depends. I've heard that Ruby is already more popular in Japan than Python. Much of the ports system in FreeBSD (like portupgrade) is written in Ruby. The fact that Ruby is a pretty young language and has already gained so much support tells much of how good it is. While it might not be quite so useful for a resume, it is good for getting results. I know where I work they don't care about the details, they just want results. Right now I write things in perl, but I have the feeling that once perl 6 comes into the mainstream, I'll be moving to Ruby. You don't have to get very far into the language to realize it's very powerful for writing quick scripts, and can scale VERY well. Aside from that it has taint checking which is also a plus - it's certainly worth it just for doing your own tasks if nothing else.

Re:From an ocaml convert:

[pikine]

I use O'Caml for about two years now, and I like it immensely. I also know Perl. When I compare the two, I'd say the problem with O'Caml for scripting is that it's more cumbersome to write regular expression matches in O'Caml than in Perl. And I have to say being able to write regular expression matching easily really is the key to many scripting tasks that I'm aware of (not necessarily what I do).

There is a remedy though. O'Caml comes with camlp4, a Pre-Processor-Pretty-Printer, which basically lets you customize the syntax of your program and add syntactic sugar. I imagine a variant of O'Caml language based on camlp4 that puts regular expression matching in syntactic sugar will make it very suitable for scripting.

In fact, I itch over this idea badly that I might do it. If I have the time. ;-)

For the issue of libraries, O'Caml actually has an OpenGL binding before PHP does! Haha.

Re:From an ocaml convert:

[gauchopuro]

I suggest you also take a look at Haskell, if you have not done so already. Haskell completely does away with side effects, performing IO operations in a controlled manner through the use of a mathematical concept known as monads. It also adds lazy evaluation. This has some nice capabilities, such as being able to express concepts as infinite lists, which are then only evaluated as far as necessary.

I have used OCaml a bit, and one of the things that most irritated me about it was its complete lack of operator overloading; having to use "+" for integer addition, and ".+" for floating point addition, just seems so wrong to me. Haskell uses type classes to allow ad-hoc polymorphism in a controlled manner.

One advantage that OCaml has over Haskell is speed; current Haskell implementations produce code somewhere between imperitive compiled languages and interpreted languages. However, there is another language, called Clean, that is nearly identical to Haskell in many ways, but claims to have speed comparable to C.

Back to the topic of the discussion, Haskell is probably not the best choice for quick and dirty one time scripting uses. The use of monads for doing IO adds a constant cost that is burdensome for very small programs, and gets payed back only with larger programs where the controlled approach to IO increases robustness.

Re:Nobody ever looks at Io or REXX...

[quantum bit]

Another one's ficl, which is basically an embedable Forth interpreter.

Random bit of trivia: The FreeBSD boot loader has a slightly cut-down version of ficl embedded (and all the boot/kernel loading logic is written in Forth).

Re:flamewar volley 1

[TheRealMindChild]

VBScript is mentioned, but I dont see it anywhere on that page

MsgBox "Hello World"

Re:Nobody ever looks at Io or REXX...

[Almost-Retired]

I haven't coded any job in anything but bash recently, but the most productive code I ever wrote or helped write was in ARexx on an amiga. FWIW, nearly 10 years later, that machine is still doing its job at WDTV-5, running an ARexx script I helped write, which itself is being run by a Cron Jim and I also wrote in ARexx, then compiled to standalone binary with rexxplus. You can see its output on the web page at http://www.wdtv.com under the news category. Its converting the rather laughably formatted teleprompter scripts to news stories you can read, as best it can with limited source information.

Surely it (REXX) deserved at least an honorable mention.

Cheers, Gene

Now Java *smaller* than C#

[vijaya_chandra]

This is cheating; nevertheless it compiles and runs with sun jdk without any problems

class A{static{System.exit(0);}}

Only 32 chars. yay!!

Re:PHP

[Tarantolato]

PHP is a mess of a language. It really is.

PHP: Free Software's answer to Visual Basic.

(Not a troll, seriously: they're both mind-bendingly hideous, oversimplified hacks that just happen to be ubiquitous because they make life easier for a lot of people.)

Re:Biased

[the gnat]

Also, in a lot of the Tcl scripts he added in a bunch of "good practice" verbosity which he didn't afford to, say, Perl

Interesting - I hadn't noticed this. Personally, I ALWAYS code Perl with 'use strict', because I've had so many bad experiences with larger scripts that were undecipherable and/or had nasty bugs due to variable mispellings. I avoid using shortcuts whenever possible.

I think these comparisons are largely bullshit anyway. Many of these programming languages have their own tics or methodologies that appeal to subsets of people. Quite a few people I've talked to (and quite a few posters here, from past experience) are annoyed by Python's syntactical indentation. Since I think everyone should be indenting their code perfectly and consistently anyway, even C or Perl, I love this feature. On the other hand, Python is too slow for some of the simple tasks I need done.

I don't think you can apply these comparisons broadly either; the code I write in scripting languages includes everything from cleaning up files and batch scripts, to text parsing, sequence alignment, and protein structure calculations. Since at least half of the code I write will never be seen or used by anyone else, I use whatever I think will get the job done fastest AND be the most fun to code in. And if I ever make someone maintain my AWK code, I'll fully expect to be thrown off the roof.

Re:Biased

[notsoclever]

On the subject of syntactic indentation, there is one very specific place where Python's syntactic indentation can easily burn you, and that place is Slashdot. Or any web-based forum which makes formatting a simple chunk of text difficult, for that matter.

One time a few years ago on some webboard I was debating with someone about the merits about syntactic formatting and so on, and he whipped out the usual strawman about "well, which is more understandable, this or this?" and of course, the (whatever the other language was) version would still run just fine (and the formatting could be easily recovered by anyone who cared to), while the Python version was totally worthless specifically because even a human couldn't recover the control structures without the formatting!

Decent code editors like Emacs and XCode and so on make the indentation easy to maintain, and easy to recover on most languages. But there is no way in hell that you can automatically recover the formatting on a language where the formatting itself is *part* of the language.

Anyway, yeah, 'use strict' (or its equivalent) is a must. Tcl enforces that by default (is it obvious that I have a thing for Tcl yet?), and it's easy enough to do in PHP as well (with ErrorReporting(E_ALL) or whatever). I have no idea why any programmer in their right mind would deploy a web application which makes assumptions about the default values of variables; many times I've been working on other peoples' PHP scripts which played fast and loose with global variables and automatic registration and so on and they were so full of security holes and REALLY difficult to debug. Like, it's happened way too often that I've been unable to figure out why a variable wasn't getting set only to discover that it was misspelled in its assignment or something.

Silly Java mistakes

[Decaff]

There are some silly mistakes in this article, suggesting that the author does not really understand the languages he is comparing.

Here are some examples:

for 'return exit code error (non zero) if a file does not exist' and 'return exit code error (non zero) if a file is not readable. There is no Java or C# code supplied. Java can easily test this: for example

new File(filePath).canRead();

and

new File(filePath).exists();

and I'm sure C# can as well.

There are other omissions:
Under Java 1.5, the System.getenv() method allows access to environment variables.

Also, saying Java is completely unusable in a scripting environment is nonsense. The BeanShell system has been around for years, and allows java to be run as if it were a scripting language, both from a command prompt or from script files. Java 'scriptlets' on JSP web pages are very common. Finally, there is a PHP/Java interface.

I don't know C# well, but I'm sure there are similar facilities for that language.

my gripe is the syntax

[CoughDropAddict]

I've tried learning OCaml a few times, and my biggest gripe with it was the syntax. One problem was that it seemed like every time I managed to wrap my head around a new syntactic construct, the tutorial would say "since that's too long to write, we use this shorthand to mean the same thing." So now I have to learn a new construct that does the same thing but also try to remember how it relates to the longer version.

Another problem is that there is very little punctuation that gives your eye any aid in seeing structure. Very often you get a bunch of keywords and identifiers in a row with no delimeters at all! A simple example of this from the tutorial:

let cos2 = compose square cos;;

Come on, cut me some slack! Is this compose(square(cos)) or (compose(square))(cos) or compose(square,cos)? I shouldn't have to think about precedence rules when I'm reading a function call, the syntax should make it clear what's going on! Another example:

let rec member x btree =
match btree with
Empty -> false
| Node(y, left, right) ->
if x = y then true else
if x < y then member x left else member x right;;

Compare this with a Python-like syntax:

let member(x, btree):
match(btree):
case Empty: False
case Node(y, left, right):
if(x = y): true
elif (x < y): member(x, left)
else: member(x, right)

I don't know about you, but to me the second example is a lot more readable. Readability is about making your eye see the structure without even trying. That's one of the reasons I like Python so much: I think it excels at making the structure unavoidably apparent.

Ocaml's definitely got some cool things going on, and I really respect the fact that smart people seem to gravitate towards it and get useful things done with it. If I ever learn it, I'm going to have to suck it up and deal with syntax I really don't like.