Introduction to Scripting Languages (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 21 Sep, 2018

All scripting languages are programming languages. The scripting language is basically a language where instructions are written for a run time environment. They do not require the compilation step and are rather interpreted. It brings new functions to applications and glue complex system together. A scripting language is a programming language designed for integrating and communicating with other programming languages. There are many scripting languages some of them are discussed below:

• bash: It is a scripting language to work in the Linux interface. It is a lot easier to use bash to create scripts than other programming languages. It describes the tools to use and code in the command line and create useful reusable scripts and conserve documentation for other people to work with.
• Node js: It is a framework to write network applications using JavaScript. Corporate users of Node.js include IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, Yahoo for real-time web applications.
• Ruby: There are a lot of reasons to learn Ruby programming language. Ruby's flexibility has allowed developers to create innovative software. It is a scripting language which is great for web development.
• Python: It is easy, free and open source. It supports procedure-oriented programming and object-oriented programming. Python is an interpreted language with dynamic semantics and huge lines of code are scripted and is currently the most hyped language among developers.
• Perl: A scripting language with innovative features to make it different and popular. Found on all windows and Linux servers. It helps in text manipulation tasks. High traffic websites that use Perl extensively include priceline.com, IMDB.

Advantages of scripting languages:

• Easy learning: The user can learn to code in scripting languages quickly, not much knowledge of web technology is required.
• Fast editing: It is highly efficient with the limited number of data structures and variables to use.
• Interactivity: It helps in adding visualization interfaces and combinations in web pages. Modern web pages demand the use of scripting languages. To create enhanced web pages, fascinated visual description which includes background and foreground colors and so on.
• Functionality: There are different libraries which are part of different scripting languages. They help in creating new applications in web browsers and are different from normal programming languages.

Application of Scripting Languages: Scripting languages are used in many areas:

• Scripting languages are used in web applications. It is used in server side as well as client side. Server side scripting languages are: JavaScript, PHP, Perl etc. and client side scripting languages are: JavaScript, AJAX, jQuery etc.
• Scripting languages are used in system administration. For example: Shell, Perl, Python scripts etc.
• It is used in Games application and Multimedia.
• It is used to create plugins and extensions for existing applications.