Let’s not argue that point-it’s not incredibly important anyway. In a world dominated by just-in-time compiled bytecode execution engines like the JVM and the CLR, these definitions get a little fuzzy.

One of the core facets, typically, that makes a language a “scripting” language (as opposed to a “system” language like C/C++ or Pascal) is that the scripting language is interpreted rather than compiled. I often wonder what that guy thinks of the success of the JVM, the CLR, Parrot, and LLVM, not to mention Ruby, Python, JavaScript and Perl. And it runs on top of a garbage-collected virtual machine, which means it’s bloated.” And so on. It doesn’t have a type system, so code written in it is buggy. “This is an application that the firm is going to depend on, so it has to be written in C++.” When I asked him why, he said, point-blank, the way one lectures a small child, “Visual Basic code is interpreted, so it’s slow. I presented my position to the boss, an IT guy who clearly wanted to make the transition to development, and his response was emphatic. Long-time VB developers know what’s coming next.

And they wanted a small database to store some configuration, and… The more I looked at it, the more it sounded like this was a problem for… (dare I admit it?) Visual Basic. It was a lot of file manipulation, writing a file here, reading a file there, copying a file to this other place and so on. But as I scoped out the project, it became apparent to me that this program didn’t cater much to C++. I was the die-hard hard-core C++ developer who prided himself on knowing the four different kinds of smart pointers, not to mention all of the Gang-of-Four design patterns and the C++ template syntax. Twenty years ago, I took a contract building a standalone desktop application for a small firm. All of it seems to surround two languages-JavaScript and Ruby-but in fact, several other languages, three of which I’ll present here, offer some distinctly interesting and useful features. Some of it is deserved, some of it isn’t. Much hoopla has been generated across the community about dynamic languages much of it is spoken in the same glowing terms normally reserved for unicorns and rainbows.

Dynamic programming prolog