"COBOL, Fortran, C++, Ada... were the scripting languages of what exactly?"
Isn't Ada the scripting language of the U.S. Department of Defense? As far as I know, most real world Ada usage is in DoD funded projects.
C++ won the battle over Objective-C to become C's successor for many applications, so fills a similar ecological niche.
First sentence from History section of Fortran Wikipedia page:
"In late 1953, John W. Backus submitted a proposal to his superiors at IBM to develop a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming their IBM 704 mainframe computer."
So Fortran was the scripting language of the IBM 704.
COBOL's Wikipedia page indicates it was championed by a committee of all the major computer industry players of its day, making it the Java of its time. So COBOL and Java may be exceptions to this "scripting language of..." rule, and instances of the "successful language created by a committee" rule. (Common Lisp, of course, being an example of "unsuccessful languages created by a committee".)
I think you misunderstand scripting here. Scripting languages are interpreted, and can be quite a bit simpler to implement and code in than compiled languages.
The "scripting language of" argument is normally presented with the first example of C and UNIX - scripting is used here to describe the purpose it's being used for, not the nature of the language itself.
Isn't Ada the scripting language of the U.S. Department of Defense? As far as I know, most real world Ada usage is in DoD funded projects.
C++ won the battle over Objective-C to become C's successor for many applications, so fills a similar ecological niche.
First sentence from History section of Fortran Wikipedia page:
"In late 1953, John W. Backus submitted a proposal to his superiors at IBM to develop a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming their IBM 704 mainframe computer."
So Fortran was the scripting language of the IBM 704.
COBOL's Wikipedia page indicates it was championed by a committee of all the major computer industry players of its day, making it the Java of its time. So COBOL and Java may be exceptions to this "scripting language of..." rule, and instances of the "successful language created by a committee" rule. (Common Lisp, of course, being an example of "unsuccessful languages created by a committee".)