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Exploring Some Lesser-Known Scripting Languages

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-dangerous-to-go-alone,-import-this dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: Scripting languages are used in everything from games and Web pages to operating-system shells and general applications, as well as standalone scripts. While many of these scripting languages are common and open to modification, there are some interesting, open-source ones that are worth a look, even if they don't have the substantial audience of some of the popular ones. Wren, Candle, Fancy, Pikt, and PPL all show what a single developer can do if they set out with enough motivation to create open-source scripting languages. The results often prove surprisingly powerful.

7 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. The best part? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    The little bit at the bottom of the page that says "Related Jobs: Could not get related jobs".

  2. Oooh is this free "Promote Your Language Day?" by lefticus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://chaiscript.com/

    Been working on it for over 5 years now. Stable and easy to use scripting for your C++ application.

    --
    I Do C++
    1. Re:Oooh is this free "Promote Your Language Day?" by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Chaiscript looks interesting - something like what I would have probably designed for a language if I was writing one from scratch. I'm currently using Lua for my game engine, but integrating the raw C API with C++ requires a lot of ugly boilerplate code.

      A question while you're here - one of the most useful features of Lua for game development (at least for me) is the support for co-routines. Each lua script (or "chunk") can have it's own stack, and can therefore suspend execution and resume later. This allows a script to sleep for a specified period of time, for example, giving the appearance of being threaded without actually requiring each script to execute on a real thread - which would be far too much overhead.

      This enables me to write simple Lua scripts like:

      DoSomething()
      Sleep(5)
      DoSomethingElse()

      Is there a way to do something similar in Chaiscript? Note: it takes a bunch of external C++ code to be able to pull this off in Lua as well, so doing it via external code is fine.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  3. Who supports it by Snotnose · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember 7-8 years ago I was lead on a new project and we were deciding on a scripting language. I wanted Python over Perl. It was clearly easier to both read and write, and had object orientation.

    What shot it down? My boss telling me "we have a thousand engineers world-wide who know perl, and you 6 will be the Python experts. You really wanna support a thousand engineers learning Python over the next 5 years?"

    1. Re:Who supports it by Marginal+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I switched from Perl to Python immediately after I discovered Python. Ironically, I first heard of Python when it was offhandedly mentioned in the book "Advanced Perl Programming." In Perl, I had developed the habit of writing a comment for nearly every line of code - much as most assembly programmers do. Python had similar semantics but much better syntax. It practically documents itself if you do it right. I never did figure out Perl's object syntax (bless, 'em), but objects are easy in Python.

      When I first learned Python, there were lots of Perl books on the shelf in the tech section of any large bookstore, and just a couple of Python books. As a Python fan, I was hoping it would catch on, and couldn't figure out why it wasn't taking the world by storm. Perl was the dominant player in CGI at that time, which made it a big thing. Over the years, I kept taking my little bookshelf polls every now and then, and the ratio changed. Turns out it just took awhile. Now, there are very few Perl books and lots of Python books.

      Thank you, Python. Oh, and thank you, Perl 6.

    2. Re:Who supports it by LordLucless · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As a Python fan, I was hoping it would catch on, and couldn't figure out why it wasn't taking the world by storm. Perl was the dominant player in CGI at that time, which made it a big thing. Over the years, I kept taking my little bookshelf polls every now and then, and the ratio changed. Turns out it just took awhile. Now, there are very few Perl books and lots of Python books.

      I think the problem was that the world didn't migrate from Perl CGI to a better CGI language; it went from CGI to PHP/Coldfusion/ASP, and python wasn't really relevant there. It wasn't until the flaws in those sort of systems became apparent, and OO, MVC frameworks like Django, Web2py, Pylons, etc, came into their own that python started appealing to the masses.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
  4. C++ by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Informative

    C++ might be a well known language but it is generally never though of as a script language. However if you are curious you can have a look at ROOT C++ or as some of us like to call it C+/-...because it is only C++ to within some (wide) margin of error.