I don't think this stands up: "It must be possible for such contender to be called from C code, because that is what it takes to be called from a modern scripti

I don't think this stands up: "It must be possible for such contender to be called from C code, because that is what it takes to be called from a modern scripting engine too." Later the author says, "If programmers wanted a statically-typed, compiled system language for their scripting efforts, they would be using the existing system languages for that already." I think the reason that scripting languages exist is because of limitations in the established languages. What we think of as "a scripting language" is defined by the gap. If someone else could be a system programming language without the gap - maybe it doesn't need to be accessed. The traditional unix platform is (1) C and a compiler for it, with access to the unix standard library and (2) some sh or csh derivative, and access to the likes of sed and awk. Shell gave people a glimpse of what was possible. But shell has poor access to the unix API, and hits the wall quickly once you do anything other than very basic tool development. So these things called scripting languages started to pop up. People wanted easy access to the unix API like C. They want easy string manipulation like shell. And they want access to functions, maps and lists without having to think about memory allocation. If you start from the shell and awk and work into that gap you get perl - the canonical scripting languge. TCL inhabits a similar space to perl. It's also "a scripting language". But it started at the opposite end. TCL starts as an extension language for C. So I can understand the author's emphsais on close interaction with C. But I don't think they're important if you can take away the shortfalls they're compensating for. I hope Go will mean I don't have to think about these things. That I'll be able to get a standard build and a go compiler/runtime and have immediate access to lots of power. No more headaches from C build tools or reaching around in the murky water underneath my scripting language.