Scripting languages are something that can be quite beneficial to developers when working on a team with multiple disciplines in it. But before we dive into what they are and how they work, and the pros and cons of using a scripting language, it's best to get a bit of a history lesson in terms of how code executes.
Underneath the hood, all the code that we have written over the course of this book is ones and zeroes indicating what switches should be marked as on and off by our computer's processor. Low-level programming languages such as machine language use these switches to execute commands. This was the only way to program to begin with, but we have developed more readable languages for us to work with instead.
Starting with assembly languages, low-level languages have a very strong connection between the language's instructions and the machine code's instructions. While more readable than a sequence of 0
s and 1
s, it was...