I was wondering what place scripting has in today's world of IDEs and GUIs.
I'm new to programming and am wondering at what point I should, if at all, open up the PowerShell terminal for a particular task. What do people here use scripting for and how important is it to a modern developer working full time with C++/C#/Java?
IDEs and GUIs don't handle the testing or deployment parts of the development process well quite yet.
In general, you will want to write a script if you ever expect to do the task more than about twice. Making a script has the following advantages:
This is well suited to tasks such as build, deployment, and automated testing.
Scripting is also great when you want to do something quickly just to see. Personally, I use my Python interpreter as a super-calculator all the time. I also use it to parse files, combined with regular expressions.
Scripting is also often used to allow clients to easily extend a system's behavior. Using a script language, a compiler (or even an IDE) is not necessary.
See Extending Packages with Scripting for an example in SQL Server 2008.
Another point to add is that several servers which are highly used do not have any GUI. Everything is run from a terminal. Almost everything is run through a script. While GUIs are nice, they are not going to be used all the time.