Where does scripting fit in today

Question

I was wondering what place scripting has in today's world of IDEs and GUIs.

I'm new to programming and am wondering at what point I should, if at all, open up the PowerShell terminal for a particular task. What do people here use scripting for and how important is it to a modern developer working full time with C++/C#/Java?

Answer 1

In general, you will want to write a script if you ever expect to do the task more than about twice. Making a script has the following advantages:

• it's not dependent on human operation (humans are fallible)
• it's repeatable
• scripts can be stored in source control

This is well suited to tasks such as build, deployment, and automated testing.

Answer 2

IDEs and GUIs don't handle the testing or deployment parts of the development process well quite yet.

Answer 3

Scripting is also great when you want to do something quickly just to see. Personally, I use my Python interpreter as a super-calculator all the time. I also use it to parse files, combined with regular expressions.

Answer 4

Scripting is also often used to allow clients to easily extend a system's behavior. Using a script language, a compiler (or even an IDE) is not necessary.
See Extending Packages with Scripting for an example in SQL Server 2008.

Answer 5

Another point to add is that several servers which are highly used do not have any GUI. Everything is run from a terminal. Almost everything is run through a script. While GUIs are nice, they are not going to be used all the time.