Scripting (was Re: Python books, literature etc)
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From: Jorgen Grahn on 8 Jan 2010 09:37 On Thu, 2010-01-07, Peter wrote: > [...] depending on your > application domain, I liked: > > 1) Hans Petter Langtangen: Python Scripting for Computational Science > A truly excellent book, not only with respect to Python Scripting , but > also on how to avoid paying license fees by using opensource tools as > an engineer ( plotting, graphing, gui dev etc ). Very good , pratical > introduction to Python with careful and non-trivial examples and exercises. Sounds good. Regarding the book's title: is it just me, or are Python programmers in general put off when people call it "scripting"? I won't attempt a strict definition of the term "scripting language", but it seems like non-programmers use it to mean "less scary than what you might think of as programming", while programmers interpret it as "not useful as a general-purpose language". /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . . \X/ snipabacken.se> O o .
From: J on 8 Jan 2010 09:57 On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 09:37, Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp(a)snipabacken.se> wrote: > Regarding the book's title: is it just me, or are Python programmers > in general put off when people call it "scripting"? > > I won't attempt a strict definition of the term "scripting language", > but it seems like non-programmers use it to mean "less scary than what > you might think of as programming", while programmers interpret it as > "not useful as a general-purpose language". I dunno... I consider it programming when I'm writing bash scripts. Same with running python scripts. My personal take on it, so YMMV, is that scripting is just a synonym for programming an interpreted language, as opposed to programming (common parlance) which is usually meant writing code for a compiled language (C, C++, VB, etc...) Then again, I also tend to use scripting, coding and programming interchangeably too. And sometimes scripting = just writing a quick and dirty program to do a small task, programming = writing something much larger for long term use. Either way, I'm not offended by any of those terms as they all involve programming, regardless of whether or not someone actually calls it programming. For another analogy, what do they call Chinese food in China? Food. Cheers Jeff -- Ted Turner - "Sports is like a war without the killing." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/ted_turner.html
From: MRAB on 8 Jan 2010 11:24 Jorgen Grahn wrote: > On Thu, 2010-01-07, Peter wrote: > >> [...] depending on your >> application domain, I liked: >> >> 1) Hans Petter Langtangen: Python Scripting for Computational Science >> A truly excellent book, not only with respect to Python Scripting , but >> also on how to avoid paying license fees by using opensource tools as >> an engineer ( plotting, graphing, gui dev etc ). Very good , pratical >> introduction to Python with careful and non-trivial examples and exercises. > > Sounds good. > > Regarding the book's title: is it just me, or are Python programmers > in general put off when people call it "scripting"? > > I won't attempt a strict definition of the term "scripting language", > but it seems like non-programmers use it to mean "less scary than what > you might think of as programming", while programmers interpret it as > "not useful as a general-purpose language". > I'd probably say that in "scripting", convenience is more important than speed. You don't need to create a project, just put the code into a file and then run it.
From: Peter on 8 Jan 2010 14:27 > Sounds good. > > Regarding the book's title: is it just me, or are Python programmers > in general put off when people call it "scripting"? > > I won't attempt a strict definition of the term "scripting language", > but it seems like non-programmers use it to mean "less scary than what > you might think of as programming", while programmers interpret it as > "not useful as a general-purpose language". > > It took me a while to take "scripting" seriously. I grew up with Pascal and Eiffel and I found it difficult to appreciate dynamic typing and scripting. The author Langtangen is explaining in detail why he considers scripting useful, in particular he provides an automatic test suite to run different language versions ( perl, python, c, c++) of the same program to compare performance. The results are amazing, in that some of the examples run faster than the C++ version. I find Python extremly useful as a general purpose language ( its clearly now my prefered one ) and I find it equally useful to develop toy apps in C++, Haskell and Lisp, just to better appreciate the idea of "general purpose". For me, it has turned out that the point is not "scripting versus not scripting" or "static versus dynamic typing" but having automatic unittests or not having automatic unittests. My most important module is "nose" for running unittests the easy way. Peter
From: Florian Diesch on 8 Jan 2010 21:29
Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp(a)snipabacken.se> writes: > Regarding the book's title: is it just me, or are Python programmers > in general put off when people call it "scripting"? > > I won't attempt a strict definition of the term "scripting language", > but it seems like non-programmers use it to mean "less scary than what > you might think of as programming", while programmers interpret it as > "not useful as a general-purpose language". For me "scripting" means something like "task automation within a given program or environment", in contrast to "wring a stand-alone program". Florian -- <http://www.florian-diesch.de/software/easygconf/> |