Script languages on the rise?

What exactly do they mean by a scripting language? To many of us, Perl is the ultimate example of a scripting language, at least when used on a Linux box for writing, well, shell scripts. But the article includes PHP. Is PHP really a scripting language? I suppose technically it is, but people don't use it to just write scripts. People use PHP to write entire server-side web applications.

And how is that any different from using, say C# in an ASP.NET application? Although ASP.NET and PHP are quite different, they do share a number of similarities. You can embed server-side C# scripts right in an ASP.NET page without using any code-behind. In that regard, C# is behaving many ways like a scripting language.

In fact, as developers move away from desktop development and onto Web development, unless you're using ASP.NET or Java, most likely you're using a so-called "scripting language". But are you using it to just write scripts? Probably not. Yet, that puts you in the half of developers that do use scripting languages.

And then of course there's the client-side code, which is usually JavaScript. I think most people would agree that's a scripting language. But if you do any web site development at all, then most likely some of your work involves JavaScript. Does that put you in the half of developers that use scripting languages?

Another problem with this survey that makes it lack much sense is that it talks about which operating system the developers are using. While there's no question of which operating system you're writing your code on, if you're doing web development, most likely you're using multiple operating systems and platforms. You may be writing your PHP code on a Windows machine and then uploading it to a Linux/Apache server, and the people browsing to your web application could be using Windows, Mac, or Linux. So there's really no clear distinction between which platform you're developing for.

And finally, the survey also mentions 54% of the respondents write multithreaded applications. But this might not be accurate, because some people might not realize that if they're creating a web application, it's almost guaranteed that they're writing a multithreaded application. (For example, when you write an ASP.NET app, your app spawns multiple threads.)

So what's up, exactly with this survey? It sounds to me it was conducted by people who haven't yet stepped up to the modern programming times and recognized what it's all about.

Thoughts?

Posted by Jeff Cogswell on December 19, 2007 1:36 PM