Besides shell and perl (which really do excel at a certain kind of task), calling a language a 'scripting language' is usually not much more than a dismissive insult by someone with a heavy investment in something like Java, which seems more serious mostly because it involves a lot of self-important boilerplate and has high levels of adoption by big old companies where you have to wear a tie.
no insult. i am deeply invest in ruby and js. calling a scripting language in my book means no a priori verification of the code before beginning to run it. Of course this is a spectrum from Coq to Ruby..
