Searching for ideal scripting language
Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode.
sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points you could really proclaim them vying for the first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the “Hello world” examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development.