Scripting languages
No doubt, embedded developers must know the C language; however, there exist several tasks that can be resolved using a scripting language. In fact, a scripting language such as PHP or Python, or even the Bash language, can be used to implement a task to manage a computer peripheral. This is because these languages have several extensions to do it and because the kernel itself offers the possibility to manage its peripherals using common files (refer to the everything-is-a-file abstraction presented in Chapter 3 , C Compiler, Device Drivers, and Useful Developing Techniques, in What is a Device Driver?  section and the following sections).
In the next sections, we're going to show a simple example on how we can manage a peripheral using a scripting language exclusively. For the moment, we have to keep our example simple because we haven't presented any peripheral in detail yet; however, in the next chapters, we're going to discover several peripheral kinds in detail, and...
