Scripting, programming for the 21st century. 

Well this article actually talks about something that nowadays is already happening. The imminent transition from system programming languages to scripting languages. It talks about the primary differences between Scripting and system programming languages. But not only about the benefits of using one rather than the other one. But gives us an idea of how the author see this transition. John K. Says that both the scripting and the system programming languages are complementary and that they have being together among the years since 1960 on most major computing platforms.

The increasing of the usage of the scripting languages is explained on the article as a group of several trends that happened on technology. These Several trends have greatly expanded the usage of Scripting languages and there is often more common that new applications are completely written on scripting languages and most of the components of the applications are primarily built using system programming languages.

To know a little of history the author mentions the beginning of the system programming languages. They were created and introduced as an alternative to avoid the usage of assembly language. The most important thing about this alternative is that statements weren’t corresponding to a machine instruction no longer. Actually there is a compiler translating each instruction into binary code in order to be executed by the computer.

The result for this advantages was that System programming languages were seen as the replacement for writing programs or code in assembly language. The author mentions that this was achieved based on three main things: That system Programming language was a Higher level Language, This is in my words that the higher the level a language is, the most similar to the human talk it is and it goes away from machine native language. The second advantage was called Typing. This language needed typing every time making easier for the compiler to know what kind of instructions it was going to execute.

Scripting languages are then going to be considered as glue languages or system integration languages because they are generally typeless, this means that they temp to be weakly typed and very high level. These languages are interpreted this means the program eliminate compile times allowing the users to program applications at runtime. In this sense it seems that scripting languages are less efficient than system programming languages because their use of interpreters instead of compilers.

There were so many other topics discussed on the article of how programmers for example are now different from the people who used to program on the past because they needed to be very specialized on a certain language in order to do their job while new programmers use scripting languages like tools to do their true job. And considering that scripting languages are higher level it is very comfortable for a programmer to practice a little on a language that will make easier his/her job.

 And so other topics such as objects. That primarily discuss the idea that the benefits obtained using OO Languages are already achieved when using scripting languages. And it is easier to implement scripting considering the problems of OO languages about inheritance. So the main idea of the author was to communicate us he’s notorious preference for the usage of scripting languages.