Difference Between Scripting Language and Programming Language

Scripting and Programming – To understand the major difference between a programming language and a scripting language, we have to understand the reason why scripting languages were born.

Initially, programming languages that written to build programs like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Internet browsers etc. These programs codes were built with various languages like c and java. These programs code needed a way for users to create or add new functionality, so they had to provide an proper interface to their bytecode and hence scripting languages were born.

Scripting and Programming

A scripting language usually doesn’t need to be compiled to run as you write something meaningful code. Microsoft excel may be built using C++ language but it exposes a scripting language called Visual Basic for Applications for users to define their custom functionality. Similarly web browsers may be built with C++/Java language but they expose a scripting language called JavaScript. Most of the games are usually built with help of C++ language but expose a programming language called Lua that allow users to define their custom functionality.

A scripting language generally sits behind some programming language. Scripting languages generally have less access to the computer’s native abilities since they only run on a subset of the programming language. Scripting languages are generally slower than programming languages.

Scripting languages may have less access and are slower, they can be very powerful programming tools. One major factor that contributing to success of scripting languages is the ease of updating as they are much more faster then the java applets. As you know the days of using java applets on the web browser, this is an example of running a programming language vs running a scripting language. At the time, computers were not powerful as there are now and JavaScript wasn’t mature as they are now so Java applets dominated the scenes worldwide. But Java applets were irritating, they required the user to sort of load on execution and compile the programming language. As in today world java applets are almost extinct from programming world and JavaScript dominates the scene. JavaScript is extremely fast to load as of java applets since most of the web browser comes with already installed components.

At Last, scripting languages are also considered programming languages but some people refuse to accept this.