Why would you want to use a scripting langauge anyway?  What are the benefits?


----

John Ousterhout described a "two language view" of application development in his article ''Scripting:  Higher Level Programming for the 21st Centry'' which was published in March 1998 in IEEE Computer Magazine.  System programming languages are good for many low level tasks, but higher level scripting (or "glue") languages are suited for application development and integration.

----

'''Productivity'''

Many people assert that you can be a lot more productive in scripting languages like [Tcl], [Python], and [Rexx] than you can in lower level languages like [C], [C++], and [Java].  The primary assertions are that you can get more work done with fewer lines of code, and that the interactive nature of scripting improves developer productivity.

One emperical study was performed at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.  This study [http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/psview?document=ira/2000/5] compared 80 different implementations of the same set of requirements by 74 different programmers for several different languages.  The study concluded (among other things) that programs written in Tcl, Rexx, and Perl took about half the programmer effort when compared with Java, C and C++.  The paper was also published in IEEE computer magazine 

----

'''Separation of Powers'''

There are a lot of software design paradigms that encourage separation of responsibilities between different parts of the system.  Using a scripting langauge like Tcl/Tk for the GUI interface, and integrated C/C++/Java code for the backend database interface helps define that separation.