To understand the difference between programming and scripting languages, first you need to know what a programming language is.
What is a Programming language?
Language is the medium of communication, and similarly, programming languages (also called computer languages) are the medium of communication with computers.
So if you want to give instructions to a computer to perform a specific task, you have to write the instructions in any specific computer language (C, C++, Java, Python, etc.).
Does the computer understand programming languages?
Computers don’t understand programming languages, they only understand binary code.
So the thing is, after writing the code or set of instructions in a programming language, you have to compile or translate it to binary code.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to compile to binary code, each computer language has its own compiler.
And here (in the compile section) comes the main difference between the Programming and Scripting languages –
Difference between Programming and Scripting language
Programming language compilation
To execute a program written in a programming language, you must first compile the program into binary code or an executable (.exe) file through a compiler.
Some Programming languages – C, C++, Java, Go, etc.
Scripting language compilation
But, there is no separate compilation step for a program written in a scripting language, it will automatically compile the code through the run time compiler (interpreter) when you execute the program.
For this type of automatic compilation, every scripting languages have a specific type of environment or host.
Some Scripting languages – PHP, JavaScript, Python, etc.
