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Recommend me a scripting language

I’ve been looking around for a scripting language that:

  • has a cli interpreter
  • is a “general purpose” language (yes, awk is touring complete but no way I’m using that except for manipulating text)
  • allows to write in a functional style (ie. it has functions like map, fold, etc and allows to pass functions around as arguments)
  • has a small disk footprint
  • has decent documentation (doesn’t need to be great: I can figure out most things, but I don’t want to have to look at the interpter source code to do so)
  • has a simple/straightforward setup (ideally, it should be a single executable that I can just copy to a remote system, use to run a script and then delete)

Do you know of something that would fit the bill?

Here’s a use case (the one I run into today, but this is a recurring thing for me).

For my homelab I need (well, want) to generate a luhn mod n check digit (it’s for my provisioning scripts to generate synchting device ids from their certificates).

I couldn’t find ready-made utilities for this and I might actually need might a variation of the “official” algorithm (IIUC syncthing had a bug in their initial implementation and decided to run with it).

I don’t have python (or even bash) available in all my systems, and so my goto language for script is usually sh (yes, posix sh), which in all honestly is quite frustrating for manipulating data.

bastion ,

Micropython.

davel , (edited )
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

That does seem to be just one, maybe two small files, and no dependencies. And a built in map() function.

wargreymon ,

guile scheme or Julia

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

Neither of them seem to be a single file, and both seem to have several dependencies, at least that’s the case with the Homebrew versions.

cmhe ,

What about Lua/Luajit?

In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.

DrFriendless ,
@DrFriendless@aus.social avatar

@gomp I like TypeScript.

I used Python for 15 years or so until they changed from v2 to v3. At that point I realised I couldn't understand my old code because it lacked types, so I got discouraged with that. So rather than learn v3 I stopped using it.

Perl is a disaster. sh is good for shell scripts but let's not stretch it.

TypeScript can use all the JS libraries and runs on node which is supported by all sorts of platforms. Yes there are a few holes in the type safety, so don't do that.

The internet is full of "how to do X in JS". You can read them and add the types you need.

explore_broaden ,

A scripting language written in Rust would certainly fulfill you requirement of only needing to copy one file since they are always statically linked and you can even statically compile against musl so it will work on any Linux system without needing a correct libc. Maybe check out rhai.

Penta ,

Maybe something like Elvish or Nushell could be worth a look. They have a lot of similarities to classic shells like bash, but an improved syntax and more powerful features. Basically something in between bash and Python. Not sure about disk footprint or general availability/portability though

vzq ,

I can’t really think of anything that’s less frustrating than sh and ticks all your boxes. You can try TCL but it’s bound to be a shit show. It was painful to use two decades ago.

Perl is a step up in terms of developer comfort, but it’s at the same time too big and too awkward to use.

Maybe a statically linked Python?

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