Scripting Languages

Created by Larry Wall in 1987. 'The duct tape of the internet' — excels at text processing and regex. TMTOWTDI philosophy ('There's More Than One Way To Do It'). Powered the early web (CGI era) and bioinformatics.

Created by Guido van Rossum in 1991 as a successor to ABC. Emphasizes readability and 'one obvious way to do it'. Influenced by ABC, C, Modula-3, and Lisp. Dominates ML/AI, data science, web backends, and scripting.

Created by Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto in 1995. Designed for programmer happiness, blending Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. Everything is an object. Ruby on Rails (2004) revolutionized web development.

Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 as 'Personal Home Page' tools. Server-side web scripting language that powers ~77% of websites with known server-side languages (WordPress, Laravel, MediaWiki). Influenced by C, Perl, and Java.

Created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 10 days in 1995. Combines Scheme's first-class functions, Self's prototypal inheritance, and Java-like syntax. The language of the web — runs in every browser and on servers (Node.js). Standardized as ECMAScript.

Created at PUC-Rio, Brazil in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes, and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo. A tiny, fast, embeddable scripting language. Dominant in game scripting (WoW, Roblox), embedded systems, and Redis.

Created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland in 1993. A language for statistical computing and graphics, descended from S (1976). Dominant in biostatistics, academia, and data visualization (ggplot2).

Work began in 2009, publicly released in 2012 by Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah, and Alan Edelman. Designed for high-performance numerical computing with the speed of C and usability of Python. Features multiple dispatch and JIT compilation via LLVM.

Created by James Strachan in 2003. A dynamic JVM language with optional typing, closures, and a concise syntax. Used heavily in Gradle build scripts and Jenkins pipelines. Influenced by Java, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

Created by Jeffrey Snover at Microsoft in 2006. A task automation framework combining a command-line shell with a scripting language. Built on .NET, objects flow through pipelines instead of text. Now cross-platform and open-source.

Bourne Again SHell, created by Brian Fox for GNU in 1989. The default shell on most Linux distributions and macOS (until 2019). Descended from the Bourne shell (1979). The lingua franca of Unix system administration and DevOps scripting.

Created by Cleve Moler in the late 1970s, commercialized by MathWorks in 1984. A proprietary language for numerical computing, matrix operations, and engineering simulation. Dominant in academia and industry for signal processing, control systems, and modeling.

Created by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs in 1977. A pattern-action language for text processing and data extraction. Named after its creators' initials. Still widely used in Unix pipelines and one-liners.

Created by Microsoft in 1991. Made Windows GUI programming accessible through drag-and-drop visual design. Descended from BASIC. VB6 (1998) was enormously popular for business apps. Evolved into VB.NET (2002) on the .NET platform.