Scripting languages are interpreted within their applications, rather than compiled to run directly by a microprocessor. This distinction makes them slower than the kinds of development efforts found in most commercial software. But most scripting languages are usually easy to use, and are often used both by professional programmers and power users.

A term you might hear when talking about API's (sharing computing). It is a set of standards for exchanging information between computer applications. EDI is most often used as a way to send the electronic equivalent of structured documents between different organizations. One study showed that firms that used EDI decreased their error rates by 82 percent, and their cost of producing each document fell by up to 96 percent.

When computers in different locations can communicate with one another, this is often referred to as distributed computing. Ex: the World Wide Web The World Wide Web, like many other distributed computing services, is what geeks call a client-server system. Client-server refers to two pieces of software: a client (software program) that makes a request and a server that receives and attempts to fulfill the request. Another example is smartphone voice recognition software, such as Apple's Siri. Voice recognition typically requires computing power far greater than that held on a smartphone, so Apple sends your voice to a more powerful collection of servers for processing and interpretation.