Slashdot Mirror
The State of Scripting Languages
Esther Schindler writes to tell us that Lynn Greiner has another look at the state of the scripting universe as a follow on to the same topic three years ago. Greiner talks to major players from each of the main scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby, and Javascript) to find out the current status and where they are headed in the future. "The biggest change since 2005 has been the growth of richer Web applications that perform more of their computations in the browser using JavaScript. The demand for these applications has forced developers to learn and use JavaScript much more than before. There's also been a lot of interest in Ruby, another dynamic language, spurred by the release and growth of Ruby on Rails. As a result of these changes, many developers are becoming more comfortable with dynamic languages."
Nah, I'm not really caught in a crossfire. I still prefer my trusty old Perl over these illegitimate kids and cousins - PHP, Ruby, Python, etc etc.
slashdot rocks
Can anyone come up with a really good definition of a "scripting language"?
As far as I can tell, it's a vaguly amorphous definition based on some notion of interpretedness, but C interpreters exist, for instance, and TCC can be used to run C "scripts".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They all still suck for about the same reasons they sucked three years ago.
The problems of Perl are well known, but it's probably the closest thing to "write once, run everywhere" that we have. Perl is essentially static at Perl 5. There's a Perl 6 effort, with a major language redesign, expected to ship shortly after Duke Nukem Forever.
PHP is gaining because it's a simple way to do dynamic web site back ends. It's not a great language, and limited to its niche, but useful there.
TCL was never a very good programming language, and it hasn't improved much.
Python is a nice language, but it still suffers from the limitations of the CPython implementation. It's slow, and integration with standard C modules is troublesome. Python has distro packaging problems - the Python maintainers don't coordinate with the maintainers of key modules, like the ones for talking to databases, and as a result Linux distros don't consistently ship with a CPython and a set of modules that play well together. That's why Python hasn't replaced Perl.
Javascript is a moderately painful language, yet we all have to use it. The object model is ill-designed; borrowing from Self was a mistake. Too much use is made of "eval", creating the "JSON" security hole. (Memo to language designers: don't combine the primitives for reading a string into an internal representation and for executing the internal representation. LISP has the "reader" and "eval"; Javascript has one function that does both.) Variable scope, given that the language has "var", is badly thought out. (Python is one of the few languages that does implicit declarations well. Perl had to retrofit "my", and Javascript had to retrofit "var", and in both cases, implicit declarations stayed, confusing the issue.) Because of this, Javascript has scaling problems. Attempts are made to paper this over with "toolkits", usually a bad sign.
I can't really say much about Ruby.
It's interesting that nobody uses Java applets much any more. It's worth understanding why that failed. But that's another subject.
I hear a lot about Ruby performance - specifically, "Ruby/Rails can't scale". The odd thing is that this is in the context of a web app, where the overhead of the interpreter opcode execution is dwarfed by the cost of going over a socket to pull data across a LAN from a database. Scaling a web app isn't about the language; it's about architecture, judicious SQL optimizations, and caching.
Oh, and if you're using rcov to measure your Rails app's code coverage, try this patch to prevent rcov segfaults. It doesn't fix the root problem, but it's a start.
The Army reading list
I was surprised that Groovy didn't appear anywhere in the article. If there's a dynamic language poised to convert the enterprise crowd, its Groovy. Able to compile into Java bytecode, compile Java code, and directly exploit the huge base of Java, but without the cumbersome Java syntax. I wouldn't be surprised to see Python and Ruby supplanted by Groovy in a couple of years.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Python has been my language for years. The pure beauty of the language together with the huge library did it for me. Plus, it's very easy to program python. Seriously. Just today, I've implemented an algorithm with a long, long loop and a lot of arithmetic operations. Python took 5:30 where Java took 10 secs. I'm serious, Python is SLOW, and last time I've checked, Ruby is even worse. (Interesting sidenote: C++ took 11 secs). I seriously love scipting languages, but the speed it horrifying. I'll stick to Java for a while.
Ruby's going through its own somewhat painful transition right now, what with 1.8.7 and 1.9. Hopefully that'll work itself out fairly soon, though.
I really like DHTML + JS + CSS for dynamic content. I downright love CSS; it takes time to learn, but it is just awsome. It's really just a problem of getting browser vendors to support a cross-platform standard for the DOM tree (I think we all know who I am talking about). Even with the mess that we have now, js libraries like prototype.js and mochikit have done a pretty good job of abstracting the browser quirks out of our code and given us a means to develop quality, working web applications quickly and easily.
Or, you could scrap all this progress and start over on a new standard. Good luck with that.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I prefer Perl's way of doing it:
my ($i,$j) = (1,2);
print $i + $j; # = 3
print $i . $j; # = 12
If you your string concatenation operator is distinct from your addition operator, it's simple to tell whether you are dealing with a string or a number from context. Plus it lets you do neat stuff like:
my $filename = 'file0000';
$filename++; # = file0001
Why write more code than you have to? Unnecessary complexity makes your code harder to write, harder to maintain, and harder to understand.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
P.S. And, btw, ask the .Net crowd about scripting languages. M$ already brainwashed them. Will you see, C# is not scripting, CLR is not interpreter. Scripts sucks because they sucks and C# is better. Scripting languages are dead. End of topic. Move on.
Really? Is that what the culture's like? I am not really a part of that so I don't know... My impression was that .NET had a lot to offer for users of Unix scripting languages - really good interaction with other languages and applications' scripting interfaces, good bindings to system facilities, and the ability to take advantage of the CLR for just-in-time compilation...
Bow-ties are cool.
An often overlooked scripting language is Mumps (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), developed in the late 1960's.
Mumps (also referred to as M) supports a multidimensional and hierarchical database facility implemented as string subscripted array references. It was widely used in clinical computing and remains to this day the basis of the U.S. Veterans Administration's computerized medical record system, the largest of its kind in the world.
Its main features are: (1) its tree-structured (multi-dimensional) database; and (2) its flexible string handling facilities which now including PCRE functions.
There are both compiler and interpreter versions available as open source/GPL packages. It supports many text processing functions, system shell integration, as well relational database access. There is also a compatible C++ library to integrate the tree structured data base access into C++ programs. The Mumps/II native hierarchical array database may range in size up to 256 terabytes.
The package is available from:
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane
(see download link).
Kevin O'Kane http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/
I did so because Python is a complete superset of Perl for me. Anything I'd previously wanted to do in Perl, I can more easily do in Python. I guess that I can't think of a problem where Perl would be the best solution anymore.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Ruby's going through its own somewhat painful transition right now, what with 1.8.7 and 1.9. Hopefully that'll work itself out fairly soon, though.
The difference is, 1.8.6 doesn't suck. Most of the difference is that 1.8.6 is slower, due to being on a slower VM. Most of what breaks (now, anyway) in the transition to 1.9 are various native extensions.
However, Perl5 does suck, compared to Ruby or Python. Perl6 looks very, very good -- but is nowhere near ready.
I could reasonably expect to pick up Ruby 1.8.6 (or 1.8.7), and have most of my existing code and coding style still work in 1.9. Or I could pick up 1.9, and backport some features to 1.8.6 (which is what 1.8.7 is, mostly).
I don't think I could reasonably expect to pick up Perl5, and know anything at all about Perl6. The best I could hope for is that most of my old code would still work in Ponie, which is Perl5 on the Perl6 engine -- implying that yes, they are completely different languages.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Perl 5 is near perfect: it does many things very efficiently, especially in coding effort department.
As a former Perl hacker who's been converted to Ruby, I must politely disagree. Perl5 is nowhere near perfect.
Perl 6 is a standard. Whatever implements standard can be called Perl 6.
Since that's "nothing", so far, it's pretty much vaporware.
CLR is not interpreter.
Again, in short: Yes, CLR is an interpreter. At least, it's every bit as much an interpreter as Perl is -- and every bit as much an interpreter as the JVM is.
There's another important difference: I can run Ruby and Python on .NET, and on the JVM. I can't run them on Parrot, which was supposed to be the one scripting VM to rule them all.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So, no interview with Mike Cowlishaw, the developer of Rexx? Ignoring Rexx, Object Rexx and NetRexx?
I thought this was about scripting languages.
And NASA alone having MILLIONS of lines of Rexx code.
I've coded Rexx on IBM CP/CMS, Amiga, and Linux.
And the Amiga version is better than what is available for Linux.
Rexx; everything is a string, and math is decimal based, with 15 digits of precision.
This part from the old TFA cought my eye:
When reading this, I immediately thought of ARexx (and now also show my fondness of the Amiga and somewhat show my age, now git of my lawn!). The use of scripting languages as glue between different programs is somewhat forgotten these days I think. Also forgotten is the easy witch with you could embed ARexx, and how extremely easy it was to interface with programs using ARexx.
I think these aspects could be better developed.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Pffft, Perl is perfectly good for anything that needs string manipulation and such.
Unfortunately for Perl, so is Python.
I think string manipulation is an area where I've found that Python just doesn't compare to perl or ruby. It is so much more annoying to write this in python: /(.*)@/) { print $1; }
if ($str =~
And no, I'm not afraid to write three more lines of code, but I hate moving logic away from the place where it's applied, just to support the limitations of a language.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Why was the above marked "offtopic", or is Perl somehow not considered a scripting language, and is Perl-6 somehow not giving similar-flavor 'warm-fuzzies' as Vista?
Perl6 != Perl, Larry admits this -- he just took the perl name for recognition, but it's a new language.
The question is -- will the community of perl5 users just let perl die?
At least with Perl, there is an option. With XP vs. Vista, ... well, there *should* be an option, but...
You can create your own table with whatever weightings you want at the language shootout page: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all
Note that I linked the Gentoo/P4 platform since it has the most ranked entries.
Why is this BS modded funny?
I guess that I can't think of a problem where Perl would be the best solution anymore.
Any task that involves iterating over a bunch of lines, applying pattern matching to them. Perl is well optimized for this, and handles it substantially better than python. Although it's worth considering whether either sed or awk might be better -- they often are.