Why are most scripting languages loosely typed?

Question

why most of the scripting languages are loosely typed ? for example

javascript , python , etc ?

Answer 1

First of all, there are some issues with your terminology. There is no such thing as a loosely typed language and the term scripting language is vague too, most commonly referring to so called dynamic programming languges.

There is weak typing vs. strong typing about how rigorously is distinguished between different types (i.e. if 1 + "2" yields 3 or an error).

And there is dynamic vs. static typing, which is about when type information is determined - while or before running.

So now, what is a dynamic language? A language that is interpreted instead of compiled? Surely not, since the way a language is run is never some inherent characteristic of the language, but a pure implementation detail. In fact, there can be interpreters and compilers for one-and-the-same language. There is GHC and GHCi for Haskell, even C has the Ch interpreter.

But then, what are dynamic languges? I'd like to define them through how one works with them.

In a dynamic language, you like to rapidly prototype your program and just get it work somehow. What you don't want to do is formally specifying the behaviour of your programs, you just want it to behave like intended.

Thus if you write

foo = greatFunction(42)
foo.run()

in a scripting language, you'll simply assume that there is some greatFunction taking a number that will returns some object you can run. You don't prove this for the compiler in any way - no predetmined types, no IRunnable ... . This automatically gets you in the domain of dynamic typing.

But there is type inference too. Type inference means that in a statically-typed language, the compiler does automatically figure out the types for you. The resulting code can be extremely concise but is still statically typed. Take for example

square list = map (\x -> x * x) list

in Haskell. Haskell figures out all types involved here in advance. We have list being a list of numbers, map some function that applies some other function to any element of a list and square that produces a list of numbers from another list of numbers.

Nonetheless, the compiler can prove that everything works out in advance - the operations anything supports are formally specified. Hence, I'd never call Haskell a scripting language though it can reach similar levels of expressiveness (if not more!).

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So all in all, scripting languages are dynamically typed because that allows you to prototype a running system without specifying, but assuming every single operation involved exists, which is what scripting languages are used for.

Answer 2

I don't quite understand your question. Apart from PHP, VBScript, COMMAND.COM and the Unix shell(s) I can't really think of any loosely typed scripting languages.

Some examples of scripting languages which are not loosely typed are Python, Ruby, Mondrian, JavaFXScript, PowerShell, Haskell, Scala, ELisp, Scheme, AutoLisp, Io, Ioke, Seph, Groovy, Fantom, Boo, Cobra, Guile, Slate, Smalltalk, Perl, …