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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.

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.

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.

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

Lemmchen ,
@Lemmchen@feddit.org avatar

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

possiblylinux127 ,

For data processing?

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.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

Only 5 years ago, everybody would be singing and shouting “perl”.

Nowadays it is python that has taken this position (even though Perl is still there and can do so much more).

Shareni ,

More like

20 years ago - perl

10 years ago - python

Nowadays - go

possiblylinux127 ,

Go isn’t a scripting language

possiblylinux127 ,

Perl is a pain to work with

Python is a lot less pain

combat_brandonism ,

Could use a hipster shell like fish, nushell or elvish. I know the latter two have the functional support you’re looking for.

paardendrummer ,
@paardendrummer@todon.eu avatar

@gomp Small footprint? Why not try forth. https://forth-standard.org/

gomp OP ,

I fear I am not enough reverse (or Polish, for that matter) :)

Anyway, I have great esteem for you (if you actually use forth and are not just trolling)

SuperFola ,
@SuperFola@programming.dev avatar

If you are interested in tiny lisp like languages, this gitlab could be of interest to you.

Full disclaimer, I came across it a few years back as I am the maintainer of arkscript (which will get faster and better in the v4, so that data about it there is accurate as a baseline of « it should be at least this good but can be even better now ».

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