>> To say today that scripting is it's core identity seems naive at best. Yes, it has roots but has object oriented and functional facets which do not exist in

>> To say today that scripting is it's core identity seems naive at best. Yes, it has roots but has object oriented and functional facets which do not exist in awk or bash. Pandas, numpy, scipy, tensorflow. All of these go way beyond what is possible with a scripting language. No, it is not. It's what you can do with a scripting language, which is a fairly straightforward functional categorization. If you are very familiar with it and really want to just ignore the performance issues and don't mind strange workarounds (eg elaborate libraries like Twisted), you probably use python. > The point is that the identity of a project doesn't flow down from its use cases. Use cases are what determines the identity of a language. It takes a massive and ongoing marketing campaign to convince people otherwise, with limited success without use-cases. Python is popular because it's a scripting language with a relatively low learning curve (one true way to do things philosophy). That's it. It will improve over time, but it's been slow going...and that's in comparison to the new Java features! Haskell is a shining example of how the language identity is foisted upon the public until you are convinced enough to try it. It doesn't take long to learn it's a nightmare of incomplete features and overloaded idioms for common tasks, so it isn't used. There aren't good use-cases for a language with haskell's problems, so the developer community and industry-at-large avoids it.