First, it'd be useless to talk about the distinction between a "scripting language' and a 'programming language', because it's clear that the same language can be used in different contexts and environments, be interpreted in some cases or compiled in others. The only distinction worth discussing in my opinion is whether a portion of source code is a script or a program . A very easy conclusion can be found in "Building Skills in Python", S. F. Lott: The “scripting” distinction is an operational feature of POSIX-compliant operating systems. Files which begin with the ‘#!/path/to/interpreter’ will be used as scripts by the OS. They can be executed from the command-line because the interpreter is named in the first line of the file. Languages like Java, C and C++ do not have this feature; these files must be compiled before they can be executed. So what happens if you have, say, a couple of thousands lines of Perl code, distributed in ...