Scripting offers massive productivity increase with little or no negative effects

A new discussion about scripting languages has experts talking of the use, growing adoption and the changing attitudes towards scripting languages. The panelists seem very optimistic of the future of scripting languages and look at them as real alternatives to more accepted languages like C# & Java.

The panelists are Norris Boyd, the creator and maintainer of Mozilla Rhino. Richard Dice, the president of the Perl Foundation, Jeff Hobbs, director of languages and Tcl tech lead at ActiveState Software, Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundation, John Lam, leader of the IronRuby team at Microsoft and Rohan Pall, PHP consultant.

Some of the key points made in the discussion –

Scripting languages in general and Python in particular can offer massive increases in productivity with little or no negative effects on eventual system performance. Where performance gains are required, extensions can be crafted in compiled languages if necessary.

Scripting (dynamic) languages are here to stay. Dynamic languages better support an adaptive/iterative development model, and so are of increasing importance in the fast-changing IT landscape of the early 21st century. They provide an excellent complement and often a better outright replacement for systems languages (such as Java, C++ and C#).

People seem more positive toward scripting languages. They have, over time, come to realize that their performance is such that they work for most problems and have also learned that the compilation step can be heavy-handed and a huge time sink in the development cycle.

Reference – Q&A: The state of the scripting universe