When I was started to learn C programming language, I only know the term Programming. After some time I learned basics of the Javascript and perl for some internal projects, from there onwards I started to use the two terms Scripting and Programming. I found some books of Javascript and Perl described this at the beginning. But most of them are not clearly specifying the difference correctly.

I think these terms were came due to the difference of how these codes are being running under the machine, ie; codes running under Interpreter were normally called as Scripts and in Compilers were called as Programs.The codes written in scripting languages are very simple to understand compared to compiled languages like C/C++ or Java.

We are using these languages to solve or implement all types of problems. There we need to give importance to the problems and how well we can solve it using an efficient algorithm, It also counts the speed of the language, memory usage, etc. The important is the Algorithm, if it is an optimal algorithm then you can select any language that you like. Currently all major Scripting languages like Python, Perl ,Ruby and Tcl/Tk are being used for general purposes along with famous programming languages like C/C++ and Java.Other scripting languages are Php (Web based applications ), Lua Script (Embedded language , very fast,low memory footprint).