It’s almost exactly like that only if the tin hat guy would turn out to be right every single goddamn time in hindsight. RMS is… a character at best, but he sure has some predictive powers.

There’s no firm delineation between scripting or programming. In many cases it boils down to “scripting is when you program in a language I deem lesser” which is just rude.

Coding is just the old timey word for encoding. I.E. basically doing what an assembler would do automatically these days. Any programming language in common use involves much more than that and deserves to be called programming.

Use debian testing if you want up-to-date software. The name implies it’s unstable, but it’s really not. Debian stable absurdly stable, and debian testing is regular stable.