When is Scripting really Programming?

I recently updated some analysis scripts in Simics to use the new OS awareness framework in Simics 4.4. While doing so, I completely updated the structure of the code, ending up with something looking suspiciously like a regular Python program. It had declarations, classes, variables, did not rely on global variables, and was fairly robust to changes in the target. This got me thinking about the difference between "scripting" and "programming". When I was a computer science undergraduate in the 1990s, I recall the difference was very simple. Programming was done in C or other real languages (with the corresponding heated debate on whether anything except C or assembly counted), scripting was done in bash. For some reason, it does not feel that simple today.

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