Scripting languages have existed for a long time, but in recent years several factors have combined to increase their importance.
The most important factor is a shift in the application mix toward gluing applications.
Three examples of this shift are GUIs, the Internet, and component frameworks.
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
GUIs are fundamentally gluing applications.
The goal is not to create new functionality but to make connections between a collection of graphical controls and the internal functions of the application.
Whether the environment is Windows, Macintosh Toolbox, or Unix Motif, GUI toolkits based on languages such as C or C++ have proven hard to learn, clumsy to use, and inflexible in the results they produce.
All of the best rapid-development GUI environments are based on scripting languages: Visual Basic, HyperCard, and Tcl/Tk.
Internet
The Internet is nothing more than a gluing tool.
It does not create any new computations or data; it simply makes a huge number of existing things easily accessible.
The ideal language for most Internet programming tasks is one that makes it possible for all the connected components to work together; that is, a scripting language.
For example, Perl has become popular for writing CGI scripts and JavaScript is popular for scripting in web pages.
Component Frameworks
The third example of scripting-oriented applications is component frameworks such as ActiveX and Java-Beans.
Although system programming languages work well for creating components, the task of assembling components into applications is better suited to scripting.
Component frameworks have been more successful on PCs, where Visual Basic provides a convenient scripting tool, than on other platforms such as Unix/CORBA, where scripting is not included in the component framework.
