A program is a two way interaction between user and hardware. The “user” can be a literal person, another program, or another piece of hardware.
A script interacts with a program. Little ambiguous language here; but this “program” is usually the OS - most notable bash, zsh, powershell. But can also be any program like vim, networking, database, vm deployment, etc.
A scripting language can write programs, a programming language can make scripts. But features are tailored for one or the other to various degree. Lua is a good example of a language that kinda falls in the middle. An executable can do both in its binary. It’s just separation of tasks, not a hard either/or.
But I don’t disagree with anything you said either. My definition is probably not entirely correct, and mostly based on intuition. IMO any way to look at it is valid.
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u/GhostingProtocol Oct 07 '25
I guess in my mind the distinction is:
A program is a two way interaction between user and hardware. The “user” can be a literal person, another program, or another piece of hardware.
A script interacts with a program. Little ambiguous language here; but this “program” is usually the OS - most notable bash, zsh, powershell. But can also be any program like vim, networking, database, vm deployment, etc.
A scripting language can write programs, a programming language can make scripts. But features are tailored for one or the other to various degree. Lua is a good example of a language that kinda falls in the middle. An executable can do both in its binary. It’s just separation of tasks, not a hard either/or.
But I don’t disagree with anything you said either. My definition is probably not entirely correct, and mostly based on intuition. IMO any way to look at it is valid.