Re: lightweight languages

[address@hidden]

   I think Ousterhout went wrong with his distinction between scripting
   languages and systems languages [*] for the same reason.  The
   distinction between scripting and systems programming seems fairly
   clear.  The categorization of a language as a scripting or systems
   language is unconvincing.  Lisp didn't fit at all, as he admitted,
   because it's good for both tasks.

Osterhout's pretty graph claiming a trade-off between scripting and
systems was, in my opinion, a really, really bogus claim. At the time
he was peddling that picture of the world, I was writing web servers
and disk-dumping scripts in the same language: scsh.

I think ML and Common Lisp also show how broken that picture is.
    -Olin