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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.

nyan ,

Technically, you could bundle a Perl script with the interpreter on another system using pp and run the packed version on systems with no installed Perl, but at that point you might as well just use a compiled language.

savoy ,
@savoy@lemmygrad.ml avatar

There’s always nushell. It’s fairly new, not quite to 1.0 yet (0.96.1 at time of writing), but the constant breaking changes seemed to have stopped. It hits all your points and it’s quite fun to use when writing scripts. Bonus that it’s also pretty much tailor-made to manipulate data.

Aquila ,

Not sure how big node footprint is but would fit the bill. Would only recommend if you wanna go into web dev career in the future tho 🙃

digdilem ,

Perl is already installed on most linux machines and unless you start delving into module usage, you won’t need to install anything else.

Python is more fashionable, but needs installing on the host and environments can get complicated. I don’t think it scales as well as Perl, if that’s a concern of yours.

possiblylinux127 ,

Python is what you want. You can install it on just about any system.

Other than that maybe Lua but that will be hell.

digdilem ,

Python is what you want. You can install it on just about any system.

Perl and bash are already there, no need to install anything.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Why not give (Common)LISP a try?

atzanteol ,

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.

Why are you making it hard on yourself? apt/dnf install a language to use and use it.

wyrmroot ,

My go to for most of what you mention is Go, but that’s obviously a compiled language and not for scripting. Or is it - What do you think about github.com/traefik/yaegi, which provides an interpreter and REPL for Go? It would let you use a performant and well documented language in a more portable scripting way, but not preclude you from generating statically linked binaries if and when that’s convenient.

Frederic ,

Quickly came to write “AWK!!!” but yeah… you don’t want its superiority… 😜

GissaMittJobb ,

I don’t know if it matches your desire for easy install of small disk space, but it might make up for it in other arenas - Ruby is my new-found love when making simple scripts. Being able to mostly emulate the shell integration that bash has by just using backticks to call a shell command is the killer feature in my book.

tiredofsametab ,

Perl or python for things likely to already be there. Maybe ruby or PHP if you must. I used to work in groovy a lot but I think it requires the JVM

atzanteol ,

Perl requres the perl interpreter and python requires a python interpreter. Why is it bad that groovy also needs a vm?

digdilem ,

Perl’s core to most distros and will be there already. Python isn’t and can be quite heavy - plus some of are are still smarting over the major version change breaking everything and the need for complicated environments.

atzanteol ,

“heavy”. It’s 2024. We have gigabytes of storage on handheld phones. I don’t buy it.

nyan ,

Last I checked, the JVM was larger than the standard Perl and Python interpreters, and had a much worse startup time (which is bad for short scripts).

als ,

vlang might fit your request pretty nicely. It’s a bit patchy in places but mainly stable and gets pretty frequent updates

RedWizard ,
@RedWizard@hexbear.net avatar

Powershell, yeah I said it!

Toribor ,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

Unironically Powershell is great and learning it has propelled me through the last 12 years of my career as a Sysadmin. My biggest complaints with it are generally Windows complaints or due to legacy powershell modules.

Tovervlag ,

Wanted to say this too but it really depends on what you’re using it for.

possiblylinux127 ,

Only good on Windows

digdilem ,

Oh dude, you are so wrong!

Powershell is available for linux and will run the same modules that have made it such a success on Windows. Want to fire up vmware containers or get a list of vms? Want to talk to Exchange servers? Azure? AWX? $large-corporate-thing? Powershell is a very good tool for that, even if it smells very Microsofty.

The linux version works well - it has some quirks (excessive logging, a MS repo that needs manual approving that breaks automatic updates) but aside from those, it just works. I have several multi-year scripts that tick away nicely in the background.

Lemmchen ,
@Lemmchen@feddit.org avatar

No one has mentioned PHP yet? Man, times really have changed.

possiblylinux127 ,

For data processing?

digdilem ,

I used it for scripting a decade after everyone else, but even I have to admit PHP is rarely the best choice now.

x1gma ,

The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.

A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.

If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.

Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.

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