Adobe Interview Question Developer Program Engineers
Country: India
Interview Type: In-Person
Programmming languages first compile the whole program and and then exectue it after its compilation where as scripting language takes one line at a time and and execute it as a command like a command line interpreter.
Example of programming languages are C, C++, JAVA and example of scripting languages are PERL, Python, Bash scripting.
Scripting languages are used to prepare prototype models.
I don't consider there to be a firm distinction between "programming language" and "scripting language", but these terms don't have rigid definitions, so different people perceive them differently.
I might add that languages are often called "scripting languages" when they're domain specific. BASH scripting is mostly about doing system-related stuff on your computer, though it can execute more general logic too. But sometimes people refer to things as "scripting languages" even though they're general purpose. Python is one example, though people refer to it as a programming language too.
In my view that probably is the factor that comes closest to explaining whether something will be called a "scripting language" or a "programming language" - was it designed for a specific domain (controlling actions in a video game, web development (Python gets a lot of its scripting rap from that), text parsing (like Perl originally was)?
Programming languages are languages that allow you to create a program by writing structured code that is read all at once by the system, checked for errors, and translated into an unreadable format that the machine can then execute. e.g. Java, C/C++, Visual Basic...
- Anonymous July 03, 2012Scripting languages are languages that allow you to send commands directly to a system that executes these commands. These commands are read line by line and executed. An error is issued when a line cannot be executed for any reasn (wrong syntax, illegal operation,...). e.g. Python, shell-script, Matlab
Programming languages are generally faster in execution than scripting languages but are often more difficult to use and have more rigid syntax. You can generally use either of them to do pretty much anything, though each is more suited for specific applications.