Ok, I'm a total linux newbie. I know VERY little about it, but I'm currently working on learning and changing that just to broaden my horizon.

I've heard alot about scripting languages such as tcl, python, perl, etc, and I think I'm going to start trying out Python.

So my real question here is that I keep reading about scripting languages and their main claim to fame seems to be development speed? They primarily compare themselves to C/C++, and I can understand that comparison, but I've never seen them compared to .NET applications?

Maybe it is just me, but I can create applications really fast in .NET with the framework libraries? Every example I read about cases where they think Python/other scripting language would be really fast / save alot of time, I can do the same task so fast in .NET that I just couldn't imagine anything being faster?

That's not to say I think .NET is the end-all and I don't think there's a place for scripting languages, I'm just trying to figure out if I'm missing some huge topic here.

So, is .NET a rapid development architecture like these scripting languages? Or are the scripting languages actually faster/better, and if so, why?