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Ask HN: Is python a programming lang. or a scripting lang?

5 points by noobplusplus ↗ HN
Google for Python and the title is - Python is a programming language.

But if I understand correctly, it is a scripting language.

So I bumped into this doubt - is python a programming or a scripting language?

13 comments

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bockris
Why does it matter?
catenate
People like to put down scripting, especially shell scripting, as "not a real language." I prefer shell scripting, since it lets me tie together programs written in many languages, each doing something that language does very well. The opposite of this would be to try to do everything in one language, which seems inefficient to me. Difficult applications of one language are often handled efficiently in some other--why not take advantage of that? Of course, I've made my peace with living in a polyglot computing world, and having to at least superficially know many programming languages and little-language tools.

The best difference I've seen between "programming" and "scripting" is Knuth v McIlroy, summarized here. http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg...

stonemetal
What do you see as the difference between a scripting language and a programming language? All scripting languages are programming languages.
shire
read his name, noobplusplus
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Rust
Helpful answer: Python is a programming language. It can be used to create scripts, making it a scripting language as well.

More or less by definition, a scripting language is a programming language.

In a practical sense, and as stonemetal says, there is no real-world difference between a programming language and a scripting language.

In a technical sense though, one might consider a programming language to have a compiler and linker and debugger and able to create stand-alone executable files. Most scripting languages can also do that these days.

Perhaps the best guide then is intent - if a language is intended for script tasks (Windows/DOS batch files, for example, or even PHP), it is a scripting language. If the language supports a wider focus, it is a more general purpose programming language (Python, C, PERL, Java, etc.).

Ultimately, the best tool for the job, selected from the tools you know :) If you're writing a web application, there are a few languages either explicitly designed for that (PHP is a good/bad example), but many other languages can do it as well (Python, C, PERL, Java, etc.). If you're writing a desktop application, PHP would not be your best bet, but Python might not be either. Ditto mobile apps.

OafTobark
Python is a general purpose programming language that can be used for scripting.
_random_
There is no strong line between two, but experienced devs would have a gut feeling. The rule of thumb is how much code can be checked during compile time. Since Python is dynamically-typed only, it makes it a script language. It's basically something you want to put on the top of some sort of "core". Another metric is the speed of execution. Python is quite slow - like other high-level script languages. There you go.
codegeek 

              Programming 
                     *
                    *
                   *
                  *
                 *
              Scripting 
                     * *
                    *   *
                   *     *
                  *       *
                 *         *
                Python     Perl...etc
SamReidHughes
There's no such thing as "scripting" languages.
AsmMAn
I think that you're a bit confusing about the terms, interpreted or compiled ones, they are programming languages. Even the first BASIC is one.
jacobquick
Rust has it right, python is a programming language. One of its more common uses is for "scripting," because you can just write it and run it at a prompt, the compilation will happen automatically if you don't do it manually. That part of python is designed to feel like scripting, but it isn't.

Because it is a general purpose programming language, you can use it to make applications as well. Right now at work I'm using Salt Stack, which is a full application written in python. Django is another popular application written in python.

It's easy to think of python as a scripting language because a lot of people who graduate to python from perl only ever used perl for scripting, but that's a general purpose language as well.

Really the difference between "programming languages" and "scripting languages" has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with restrictions placed on the environment you use it in. Where a normal install of python would let you code scripts or full applications, a purposefully limited version of it (for example a limited version of python is bundled as a mod tool in the game Civilization 4) makes that specific implementation "scripting" or "macroing" or however else you want to classify it. The language itself is still python, though.