I think the consensus on the definition of _system_ languages is currently very shaky. For a long time you would expect languages with the ability to develop operating systems (in the classic sense, providing a hardware abstraction layer, etc.), but more and more I get the feeling that people just mean "not JavaScript".

If this is a good or bad development will (or already is, as we have seen in discussions concerning Go) be the topic of many flame wars.

I guess "avoiding bash by using python" counts as systems programming :-)

I've seen vanilla JS described as "bare metal programming" a few times.

I think there's one or more build systems written in Python, in addition to stuff like Anaconda. A lot of scientists use Python for their work, which (to my mind) falls between web dev and systems programming, but the paper is not that granular.

Python gives Perl and bash a run for the money when it comes to systems scripting, if you're willing to catagorize "systems scripting" as systems programming.

So for the paper, "systems programming" means "not web development"? That's... both sad and appalling.