"a script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience." That's not meant to make sense, he's famous for his wise cracks.
Actually it does make sense. Maybe it's not terribly accurate, but it's clever =o)
My personal take on the naming is that people need to lighten up. It's all programming anyway, regardless of how simple or "nefarious" (I don't recall hearing anyone insist that spam is not email). A script, in my opinion, is any application that a user executes while it's in plain text form. Whether it gets compiled or interpreted at runtime is an insignificant difference. The main thing is that a script is plain text from the user's point of view, so it can be easily read, transferred, dissected, and improved at any time, right up to the second it is executed (and apparently beyond that point, for some languages). Little technicalities concerning the naming of things (Linux vs. GNU/Linux) have their place (legal documents, for example), but should remain ignorable in everyday communication.Indeed.
Yes Larry's clever (and funny) all right. He also peppers his code with wisecracks etc. There's a collection somewhere .. some of these require a knowledge of the Perl world to get.
They might not like getting called "scripters" but one nice thing about the Perl community is that they are very tolerant of beginner's code (Larry Wall calls it "babytalk", but that's meant to be affectionate - he likes babies - not patronizing), because any Perl that works and is syntactically correct is ok, and there's many ways to do any one thing in Perl. And it's easy to start but there's a seemingly infinitely long learning curve after that (as I have found out ) ....
original here.