Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers

I believe that scripting languages represent the most important branch of open source development. First of all the key assumption behind open source is that the source of the program should be readable and modifiable. This is simply not true for a complex 10K lines C or C++ program. So expressiveness of the language and its level are very important factors, that are commonly overlooked. I strongly believe that these languages will be mainstream industrial languages in the coming years. We will discuss only five of them: Perl, TCL, Python, Javascript and PHP. (chapter 6)

john k. ousterhout: 'scripting: higher level programming for the 21st century'