People like to put down scripting, especially shell scripting, as "not a real language." I prefer shell scripting, since it lets me tie together programs written in many languages, each doing something that language does very well. The opposite of this would be to try to do everything in one language, which seems inefficient to me. Difficult applications of one language are often handled efficiently in some other--why not take advantage of that? Of course, I've made my peace with living in a polyglot computing world, and having to at least superficially know many programming languages and little-language tools.

The best difference I've seen between "programming" and "scripting" is Knuth v McIlroy, summarized here. http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg...