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Comment on Ask HN: Is python a programming lang. or a scripting lang?

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Rust has it right, python is a programming language. One of its more common uses is for "scripting," because you can just write it and run it at a prompt, the compilation will happen automatically if you don't do it manually. That part of python is designed to feel like scripting, but it isn't.

Because it is a general purpose programming language, you can use it to make applications as well. Right now at work I'm using Salt Stack, which is a full application written in python. Django is another popular application written in python.

It's easy to think of python as a scripting language because a lot of people who graduate to python from perl only ever used perl for scripting, but that's a general purpose language as well.

Really the difference between "programming languages" and "scripting languages" has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with restrictions placed on the environment you use it in. Where a normal install of python would let you code scripts or full applications, a purposefully limited version of it (for example a limited version of python is bundled as a mod tool in the game Civilization 4) makes that specific implementation "scripting" or "macroing" or however else you want to classify it. The language itself is still python, though.

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