From: John Woods <jfw@funhouse.com>
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: The Art of Programming
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 23:54:35 -0400
Lines: 19
Message-ID: <37E7017A.C26AE2EB@funhouse.com>
Reply-To: jfw@funhouse.com

The question came up, "what is the difference between programming
and scripting?"

There is an entire hierarchy of related activities here:

programming:  when you create a detailed list of instructions for a
computer that tell it to do some task incorrectly.

software engineering:  when you use a careful methodology to create a
program that doesn't work just like the previous time you wanted to
do a similar task.

computer science:  when you can prove, mathematically, that the program
you wrote doesn't work the way you wanted it to.

And, of course, scripting is when you use a lightweight, rapid-prototyping
interpretive programming system to write several incorrect programs in a
single afternoon.