Capability — ergonomics

Scripting ergonomics

A language you can use in the ten seconds between ideas.

BASIC put a programming language on a teletype in 1964; the shell and awk turned it into a way to glue tools together; Perl made glue its speciality; Python made it readable; Ruby made it pleasant; JavaScript put it in every browser on Earth.

What they share is a low ceremony floor: a REPL that answers instantly, files that run directly, no compile step, and a standard library that covers the boring eighty percent. It is why these languages conquered the parts of computing nobody writes a specification for.

The trade-off

Interpreted code is slower, and the gap matters more every year — which is why Python, PHP and Ruby all grew a compiled core or a JIT.
A REPL is a wonderful way to explore and a poor way to ship: the code you typed at the prompt is not versioned, tested or reviewed.

Where it came from

BASIC, 1964, in a school computer shop; Perl, 1987, for the messy web; Python, 1991, for reading.

in practiceperl

while (<>) {
  s/^\s+//;                # trim
  print if /error|warn/i;  # filter
}
# a whole job, in three lines, no ceremony

Who carries it

canonical 12

present 11

partial 9