On Tuesday, 15 January 2013 at 06:30:33 UTC, Rob T wrote:
A really important advantage that scripting languages provides
that D does not currently provide, is direct runtime
interpretation of the language. This is very important for the
use cases of script languages such as Ruby and PHP, because
often they are used for coding and testing on the fly, ie.,
used in an environment that requires frequent changes with
almost instant feedback.
This is true. On the other hand, if you do quick and dirty stuff
(count the frequency of certain words, parse data files etc.),
the compilation time is not really an issue, and due to
unnecessarily ugly syntax (PHP, Perl) or indentation (t)errors
(Python) you sometimes lose time, or cannot just copy and paste
snippets to test them without checking your spaces.
[...]
A language such as C++ seems like a bad fit for a scripting
language because of it's complexity and the difficultly with
parsing through it. Also a scripted language probably should
not have low level access that is provided by languages such as
D and C/C++.
--rt
Why not? In my experience small scripts often turn into bigger
programs and sooner or later you need some sort of low level
features. Then you have to write modules in C/C++ and use Swig or
something to integrate them. That's why I prefer D, because you
can get the whole shebang _if necessary_. There are also
copyright issues. If you deliver a Python program, anyone could
rip it, even if you compile it to byte code. If you distribute
native executables, it's harder to rip your program. In general,
I find scripting languages less useful for projects that (might)
develop into something bigger. Now that I come to think of it,
scripting languages are inherently "quick and dirty", that's why
they are not really scalable (think of the class system in Python
and Lua, not the real deal).
