I think Simon Cozens stated my attitude very well:

Perl is sometimes called a `scripting' language, but only by people who don't like it or don't understand it. Firstly, there's no real difference between programming and scripting - it's all just telling the computer what you want it to do. Second, even if there was, Perl's as much of a scripting language as Java or C... The people who call them `programs' on the whole write better ones.

The point being that if you think of programming and scripting as different things, you will be inclined to take shortcuts while "scripting" that you would never take while programming, and you will not be inclined to learn how to really use Perl to its limits.

In short the difference is in attitude, and thinking about programming as scripting is unwise.