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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."

3 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Re:From an ocaml convert: by gauchopuro · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  2. Re:good but recognized? by archen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Silly Java mistakes by Decaff · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.