When we call something a scripting language, we’re primarily making a linguistic and cultural judgement, not a technical judgement.

For a given dimension X, different scripting languages make different choices, set the knob at different locations.

• You can’t even think about X!
• There’s only one way to do X!
• There’s more than one way to do X!
• There are too many ways to do X!

I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I’m permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right.

I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like were insane.

Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That’s rapid prototyping.

Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals.

And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.

I’ve always admired Tcl’s delegational model of semantics. But it fell into the same trap as LISP by expecting everyone to use the One True Syntax. Speaking of the One True Syntax: I don’t really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented.

PHP takes the worse-is-better approach to dazzling new depths

I read [the word "text"] from a postmodern perspective. Of course, the term Postmodern is itself context-sensitive. Some folks think Postmodernism means little more than the Empowerment of the Vulgar. Some folks think the same about Perl. But I take Postmodernism to mean that a Text, whether spoken or written, is an act of communication requiring intelligence on both ends, and sometimes in the middle too. I don’t want to talk to a stupid computer language. I want my computer language to understand the strings I type.

Human languages therefore differ not so much in what you can say but in what you must say. In English, you are forced to differentiate singular from plural. In Japanese, you don’t have to distinguish singular from plural, but you do have to pick a specific level of politeness, taking into account not only your degree of respect for the person you’re talking to, but also your degree of respect for the person or thing you’re talking about.

So languages differ in what you’re forced to say. Obviously, if your language forces you to say something, you can’t be concise in that particular dimension using your language. Which brings us back to scripting.

I like it when most of the actual words are those chosen by the programmer to represent the problem at hand. I don’t like to see words used for mere syntax. Such syntactic functors merely obscure the real words. That’s one thing I learned when I switched from Pascal to C. Braces for blocks. It’s just right visually.

Actually, there are languages that do it even worse than COBOL. I remember one Pascal variant that required your keywords to be capitalized so that they would stand out. No, no, no, no, no! You don’t want your functors to stand out. It’s shouting the wrong words: IF! foo THEN! bar ELSE! baz END! END! END! END!

Classes in Java are closed, which is one of the reasons Java can run pretty fast. In contrast, Ruby’s classes are open, which means you can add new things to them at any time. Keeping that option open is perhaps one of the reasons Ruby runs so slow. But that flexibility is also why Ruby has Rails.

Multiple dispatch is like democracy. It’s the worst way to do late binding, except for all the others.

Among the generalists, the conventional wisdom is that the worse-is-better approach is more adaptive. Personally, I get a little tired of the argument: My worse-is-better is better than your worse-is-better because I’m better at being worser! Is it really true that the worse-is-better approach always wins?

With Perl 6 we’re trying to sneak one better-is-better cycle in there and hope to come out ahead before reverting to the tried and true worse-is-better approach. Whether that works, only time will tell.