Got a kick out of this incorrect, specious, but vaguely entertaining article (don't get me started on the inaccuracies), which is really just a shallow ad for a book (-1 to ACM TechNews for pointing to it).
Rexx was probably the first scripting language I'd used, back in 1989 during a summer job at IBM. We were supposed to be running performance tests on different Ada compilers and writing up standardized reports for competitve reasons, a process which took approximately two to three weeks per compiler. We instead hacked up a set of Rexx scripts to automate the whole thing, running the compiler through the tests, post-processing the data, caching the results for further tests, and writing 95% of the final report as a set of SGML files. Took the time down to about two hours from start to finish. Even better when we had to demo the automation system to others in the group, we wrote our own "Ada compiler" (strangly optimized to handle a particular set of input files...) in Rexx, taking the whole process down to ten minutes for that particular one. The report, comparing our super-optimized compiler against the IBM produced one, ended up on a bunch of senior managers desks at the end of our last day there, not sure quite what reaction that brought...
Since then, scripting has been a pretty big part of my toolkit. A year later, we'd modified a PILOT interpreter (a teaching language from the late 70's) to help simplify programming apps for a Nortel smart phone platform (Norstar); using that, a simple text mail retrieval system was coded up in about a week, comparable to one someone else had done for about $1 million using the standard C toolbox which we'd wrapped. Awk proved to be a great tool for statistics and report generation. And of course, while I'd dabbled with it a bit earlier, Tcl/Tk let me redo my MSc project in the few weeks between when I'd submitted my thesis and defended it (yes, the first version of GroupKit was C++). Since then, well...
For me, scripting had always been about thinking different about problems, capturing the real essence, and using the computer to automate away the drudgery that most people get caught up in. I'm not sure I'm using it quite as effectively today...
