There is no much difference between programming and scripting, in fact, scripting languages are a subset of programming language and hence all are programming languages. Generally, scripting languages are used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. In such systems, useful functionality is already available through a user interface, and the scripting language is a mechanism for exposing that functionality to program control.
While a Programming Language generally is used to code the system from Scratch.
What are Programming languages?
Programming languages are high level languages which are used to program a computer or machine with a set of instructions called source code. These source code are compiled by a compiler (converted to machine code) then passed to the machine to perform instructions as instructed by a programmer. Through this we create any software or application and these are created from scratch.
What are Scripting languages?
As we discussed earlier, scripting languages are a subset of programming languages and are also a programming language. Scripting languages are not a standalone programming language, meaning they don’t work individually.
They are embedded with others to automate or add some extra functionality to the existing application by controlling or guiding the existing application. Also the source code of scripting language is not compiled, they are directly executed, a popular example is Javascript engine ‘v8’ in chrome which executes the source code on the fly.
These languages are quite slower than programming languages and are mostly used for web applications.
If you don’t the know difference between Compiler and Interpreter, then you can read it here, also you can watch this video.
Difference between programming and scripting
| Parameter | Programming | Scripting |
| Execution | Its source code is first compiled to machine code into a separate file then it’s executed separately | Its source code is executed directly and no separate compiled file is created. |
| Execution time | Faster if using compiler | It is slower than traditional programming |
| Language independency | It’s a standalone language and doesn’t depend on anyone | It’s embedded with other like HTML and CSS and is not a standalone language |
| Usage | Used for developing various applications such as desktop, mobile, web, game, etc. | It is mostly used for web application |
| Access | It can access low level-level hardware details for example file system | It has less access to computer native abilities since they run on a subset of the original programming language. |
| Category | It can be categorized into high level, low level and compiler or interpreter based languages. | It can be categorized into server or client side language |
| Complexity | It is quite harder to learn | Easy to learn |
| Examples | Java, C,C++, Python, assembly etc | JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, etc |
Also, the last thing I would like to add here is, many differentiate programming and scripting through the way their code is executed like if the code is compiled before execution then it is a programming language else it is a scripting language, which is partially true. Because whether a language is a “scripting” language or not can be more about the environment than the language we can design an interpreter for C language and use it as a scripting language, and at the same time, we can design a compiler for JavaScript and use it as a non-scripting(compiled language).
If you want to learn more about it, then you can visit here
Data Scientist with 3+ years of experience in building data-intensive applications in diverse industries. Proficient in predictive modeling, computer vision, natural language processing, data visualization etc. Aside from being a data scientist, I am also a blogger and photographer.
