The name "Scripting Language" refers to a very specific role: the language into which you write commands to be sent to an existing software application. (e.g. traditional television or the movie "script")
For example, once HTML web pages were boring. They have always been static. Then one day, Netscape thought: "Hey, what if we allow the browser to read and act on small commands on the page?" And so, Javascript was created.
A simple javascript command is the alert() command, which instructs / controls the browser (software application) that reads the web page to display a warning.
Now, is alert() connected in any way with C ++ or some other code language that the browser actually uses to display a warning? Of course not. Someone who writes "alert ()" on an .html page does not understand how the browser actually displays a warning. He simply writes a command that the browser interprets.
Check out simple javascript code
<script> var x = 4 alert(x) </script>
These are instructions that are sent to the browser for the browser to interpret on its own. The programming language that the browser scans to actually set the variable to 4, and put it in a warning ... it is not completely associated with javascript.
We call the last series of commands "script" (therefore, it is enclosed in <script> tags). Just by definition a "script", in the traditional sense: A series of instructions and commands sent to actors . Everyone knows that a script (movie script), for example, is a script.
A script is not actors, cameras, or special effects. The script just tells them what to do.
Now, what is a scripting language , exactly?
There are many programming languages that are similar to the various tools in the toolbar; some languages have been developed specifically for use as scripts.
Javasript is an obvious example; There are very few Javascript applications that are not within the scope of scripting.
ActionScript (flash animation language) and its derivatives are scripting languages because they simply issue commands to the Flash player / interpreter. Of course, there are abstractions, such as object-oriented programming, but all this is just a means to the end: send commands to the flash player.
Python and Ruby are also commonly used as scripting languages. For example, I once worked for a company that used Ruby commands for a script to send to a browser that was in turn, "go to this site, click this link ..." to do basic automated testing. I was not a “software developer” in any way at this job. I just wrote scripts that sent commands to a computer to send commands to a browser.
By virtue of their nature, scripting languages are rarely "compiled", that is, translated into machine code and read directly on a computer.
Even GUI applications created from Python and Ruby are scripts sent to APIs written in C ++ or C. It tells the C application what to do.
Of course, there is a line of uncertainty. Why can't you say that Machine Language / C are scripting languages because they are scripts that the computer uses to interact with the base motherboard / graphics cards / chips?
There are a few lines we can do to clarify:
When you can write a scripting language and run it without “compiling” it is more like a direct script. For example, you don’t need to do anything with a script to tell the actors what to do with it. It already exists, is used as it is. For this reason, we exclude compiled languages from called scripting languages, although in some cases they can be used to create scripts.
The scripting language implies commands sent to a complex software application; that the whole reason is that we write scripts in the first place - so you don’t need to know the complexities of how the software works to send commands to it. Thus, scripting languages are usually languages that send (relatively) simple commands for complex software applications ... in this case, the machine language and assembly code do not shorten it.