From: Jorgen Grahn on
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
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
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

> 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
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/>
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