Scripting languages are those that the code gets thrown away when the application gets rewritten in C, C++, Java, C#, ... in order to perform properly.

I think the issue is now more one of language philosophy than language implementation now.

In my mind languages tend to have an optimal code size where they work well, and what works at <1000 lines often does poorly at even 10k lines.

In my mind, the difference is clear: scripting language == has REPL == lets you treat it as a calculator, and (in practice) has a one-line, one-statement "hello, world".

So, I don't think go is a scripting language. It requires you to write a function and then call it before it will output anything.

So, forth, JavaScript, lisp, lua, perl, python, ruby do qualify as scripting languages in my book.