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Ousterhout's dichotomy
Ousterhout's dichotomy is computer scientist John Ousterhout's categorization[1] that
high-level programming languages tend to fall into two groups, each with distinct
properties and uses: system programming languages and scripting languages – compare
programming in the large and programming in the small. This distinction underlies the
design of his language Tcl.

System programming languages (or applications languages) usually have the following
properties:

• They are typed statically

• They support creating complex data structures

• Programs in them are compiled into machine code

• Programs in them are meant to operate largely independently of other programs

System programming languages tend to be used for components and applications with
large amounts of internal functionality such as operating systems, database servers, and
Web browsers. These applications typically employ complex algorithms and data
structures and require high performance. Prototypical examples of system programming
languages include C, OCaml and Modula-2.

By contrast, scripting languages (or glue languages) tend to have the following properties:

• They are typed dynamically

• They have little or no provision for complex data structures

• Programs in them (scripts) are interpreted

Scripting languages tend to be used for applications where most of the functionality comes
from other programs (often implemented in system programming languages); the scripts
are used to glue together other programs or add additional layers of functionality on top of
existing programs. Ousterhout claims that scripts tend to be short and are often written by
less sophisticated programmers, so execution efficiency is less important than simplicity
and ease of interaction with other programs. Common applications for scripting include
Web page generation, report generation, graphical user interfaces, and system
administration. Prototypical examples of scripting languages include Python, AppleScript,

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C shell, DOS batch files, and Tcl.

History

The dichotomy was fully set out in Ousterhout (1998), though Ousterhout had drawn this
distinction since at least the design of Tcl (1988), and had stated it publicly at various
times. An early episode was "The Tcl War (http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/)
" of late September and October 1994, where Richard Stallman posted an article critical of
Tcl, entitled "Why you should not use Tcl",[2] to which Ousterhout replied with an
articulation of his dichotomy:[3]

I think that Stallman's objections to Tcl may stem largely from one aspect of
Tcl's design that he either doesn't understand or doesn't agree with. This is
the proposition that you should use *two* languages for a large software
system: one, such as C or C++, for manipulating the complex internal data
structures where performance is key, and another, such as Tcl, for writing
small-ish scripts that tie together the C pieces and are used for extensions.

Criticism

Critics believe that the dichotomy is highly arbitrary, and refer to it as Ousterhout's fallacy
or Ousterhout's false dichotomy.[4] While static-versus-dynamic typing, data structure
complexity, and dependent versus stand-alone might be said to be unrelated features, the
usual critique of Ousterhout's dichotomy is of its distinction of compiling versus
interpreting. Neither semantics nor syntax depend significantly on whether a language
implementation compiles into machine language, interprets, tokenizes, or byte-compiles at
the start of each run, or any mix of these. In addition, basically no languages in widespread
use are purely interpreted without a compiler; this makes compiling versus interpreting a
dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages.

References

1. Ousterhout, John (March 1998). "Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century" (h
ttps://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pdf) (PDF). IEEE Computer magazine.
Retrieved March 27, 2020.

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2. Stallman, Richard (1994-09-23). "Why you should not use Tcl" (https://groups.google.com/d/
msg/comp.lang.tcl/7JXGt-Uxqag/3JBTj5I43yAJ) . Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl (news:comp.lan
g.tcl) . Usenet: 9409232314.AA29957@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu (news:9409232314.AA29957@
mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu) . Retrieved 2015-09-13.

3. Ousterhout, John (1994-09-26). "Re: Why you should not use Tcl" (https://groups.google.com
/d/msg/comp.lang.tcl/7JXGt-Uxqag/vQNLEgvjmWsJ) . Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl (news:com
p.lang.tcl) . Usenet: 367307$1un@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM (news:367307%241un@engnews
2.Eng.Sun.COM) . Retrieved 2015-09-13.

4. Stuart Halloway. Osterhout's Dichotomy Isn't (https://web.archive.org/web/20180117182251/htt

ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ8u_sWT9Ls) . Archived from the original (https://www.you
tube.com/watch?v=KZ8u_sWT9Ls) on 2018-01-17.

Further reading

• Kumar, Deepak (September 2010). "Reflections: language wars and false dichotomies"
(http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1835431) . ACM Inroads. 1 (3): 10–11.
doi:10.1145/1835428.1835431 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F1835428.1835431) .
S2CID 34789810 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:34789810) .

• Grover, Andy (19 June 2009). "Become a better programmer by bridging Ousterhout's
Dichotomy" (https://www.slideshare.net/guest2838a0/bridging-ousterhouts-dichotom
y) . Open Source Bridge.

External links

• Ousterhout's dichotomy (http://wiki.tcl.tk/9865) at the Tcl wiki

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