Agile Languages

From Hackers-IL

Agile Languages (many times referred to as Scripting Languages) are a collection of languages that have the following qualities:

1. They are high-level. They have some form of Garbage Collection and don't require needing to think about allocating or freeing data.
2. Contain good facilities for text processing. (such as Regular Expressions)
3. Allow control of the various aspects of the host system. Provide random file I/O, networking, running other programs, etc.
4. Portable. At least across the various versions of UNIX. Possibly even to Win32, DOS or Embedded operating systems.
   • Tend to provide a unified way of doing things across all these platforms.

Due to their expressiveness and power, agile languages are favoured among Hackers. Many times a hacker using an agile language can achieve what it takes a relatively clueless programmer a lot of time to achieve in a non-agile language, in a fraction of the time. Because of that, Perl and other agile languages were known to be banned from many programming competitions.

Agile Languages include:

• Arc (note: still planningware)
• Perl
• Python
• Ruby
• Tcl