Before getting into the question of whether Python is a programming language or scripting language. First, we will try to get some basic understanding of programming and scripting languages along with the differences between them then we can easily come to a conclusion or solution to our question.
Python is designed and developed by Guido Van Rossum in 1991. It is the most popular for machine learning tasks. Being a Python beginner, a lot of questions come to our mind like is it a programming language or interpreter or scripting language. The simple answer to this question is yes. It is more than a scripting language. It is also an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language. But in this article let us find out how?
What is scripting language?
The scripting language is a programming language designed to interact with other programming languages. They are often interpreted and not compiled. Not all programming languages are scripting languages, but all scripting languages are programming languages.
Difference between scripting and programming languages
As I mentioned before, all programming languages are not scripting languages, but all scripting languages are programming languages.
Now let us try to understand the key difference between scripting and programming languages. In both the difference is due to compiler and interpreter.
Compiler: First converts the program into assembly code and then to machine code.
Interpreter: It converts and executes the program line by line.
Like JavaScript Python does not require compilation whereas C++ requires compilation.
Scripting languages are used to create websites whereas programming languages are used for software creation. Scripting languages are slower than programming languages since it is executed line-by-line. It also uses less code.
Using Python, we can write scripts to automate simple tasks and also complex programs like web applications, data analysis tools APIs and much more. It is very popular in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
So, Python is a Programming language that uses scripts which can be compiled and run-in real-time Python interpreter, thus acting like both a compiled programming language and scripting language.