What is your favorite scripting language?

I'd love to say perl, but lets be realistic - in terms of quantity, it would appear that my favorite scripting language is plain old bourne shell, just mind numbing scripts I write as typical sys admin tasks.

If I have an interesting problem, I turn to perl, but the ratio of interesting problems to every day grunt work automation is pretty low.

These stats are not very indicative. Although it could be used as a Command Line scripting language, its usefulness is more obvious in database based web services applications, and in spite of TC not liking it. :)

It's worth taking a look at Script-o-meter: http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/scripting-l...

An attempt at an objective rating on scripting languages.

I don't know why we tolerate these silly "What's your favorite X?" poll. They're just flamebait. This case is typical: some non-ignorable fraction (> 10%) will not give up Perl. Another non-ignorable faction will like Python, and other fractions will like sh, awk,& etc. These polls also always include arguable entries. I personally would argue against including awk as a separate thing: it's definitely merely a part of shell scripting.

But you can see that with Script-o-meter, it's possible to rate these things. It's possible to do more-or-less objective ratings of almost all arguable things, but it's more profitable for consultants to advocate one thing (C#) over another, and provide your mega-corp with a costly "solution" to what should constitute a non-problem.

> it's possible to rate these things.

Of course you can rate programming languages. I do not, however, see how Script-o-meter can tell me anything useful about the language I should use for the tasks I do. There is an arbitrary set of criteria with an arbitrary set of weights. Take "compilation and execution in one command (20 points)". Where does the 20 points come from? What if I don't care that it takes more than one command?

Scripting languages are by their very nature designed to do many things. It is therefore impossible to rate them in a meaningful way.

My favourite is TECO. Seriously. It just rocks :)

Kiddie

My favorite scripting language is English. It's the only language I've ever considered writing a screenplay in.

I write all my screenplays in Bash.

Which is why you've probably never heard of them.

You were the one with those Christmas-slide screenplay gus? I heard of it! That screenplay was even covered at LXer ;)

I don't write screen plays on principle. I use paper.