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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.

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

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.

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

perl might be on all your systems. It’s kind-of a legacy, but still actively developed. It’s not a great language: it looks like bash scripting on steroids. But if you just need to write some small scripts with a language more powerful than awk or bash, it does the job. If perl isn’t on all of your systems already, then I would choose a better scripting language.

Findmysec ,

TBH I don’t even use awk that much, even that is plenty powerful for my needs. Perl absolutely blows my mind with how needlessly complex I can make stuff with it

silasmariner ,

Everyone always dunkin’ on Perl, but I can’t even tell you how often it’s been the best tool for the job. Like, at least 3

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.

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?

lord_ryvan ,

Why aren’t python and bash be available in all your systems? Which languages would be?

I would’ve recommended python, otherwise perl or Haskell (maybe Haskell’s too big) or something, but now I’m worried that whatever reason makes python undoable also makes perl etc. undoable

gomp OP ,

Why aren’t python and bash be available in all your systems?

Among others, I run stuff on alpine and openwrt.

I don’t need to run these scripts everywhere (strictly speaking, I don’t need the homlab at all), but I was wondering if there’s something that I can adopt as a default goto solution without having to worry about how each system is packaged/configured.

As for python, I doubt the full version would fit in my router plus as said I don’t want to deal with libraries/virtualenvs/… and (in the future) with which distro comes with python3 vs pyton4 (2 vs 3 was enough). Openwrt does have smaller python packages, but then I would be using different implementations on different systems: again something I’d rather not deal with.

As for perl, it would be small enough, but I find it a bit archaic/esoteric (prejudice, I know), plus again I don’t want to deal with how every distro decides to package the different things (eg. openwrt has some 40+ packages for perl - if I were doing serious development that would be ok, but I don’t want to worry about that for just some scripts).

lord_ryvan ,

Is compiling scripts an option? Aka compiling them in C, C++, Rust, whatever for your router on another machine, and copying and executing those binaries on your router?

mbirth ,

Sounds like you want MicroPython. It’s definitely available on OpenWrt and AlpineLinux and has a very small footprint.

If you don’t like Python, have a look at Lua/luajit.

flubba86 , (edited )

You might be interested in Raku. It is Perl6, or what used to be called Perl6, but it deviated too far away from the original perl and it ended up with a different team of developers than perl 5, so they forked it, changed the name and turned it into a new language.

Shareni ,

if there’s something that I can adopt as a default goto solution without having to worry about how each system is packaged/configured.

Go is probably your best bet. Simple to use, and you can compile it so it runs everywhere

WatTyler ,

Mate, I came on here to post Haskell as a semi-ironic ‘joke’ and it’s included in the top comment. You’ve made my day.

lord_ryvan ,

I mean, it’s a functional programming language and an incredibly good one. But it probably has a far too big footprint for their use-case…

WatTyler ,

Oh, I know. I adore Haskell.

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