this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

You should probably check out Guile.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

posix sh + awk for manipulating data?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Perl would be my candidate for more advanced text handling than what sh can do.

Never used Lua but I think it's fun.

If nothing else works, just learn C/Rust. There's plenty of that on Linux systems, I think you'll be able to manage. Yes, it doesn't meet a lot of your requirements.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

@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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

nim is great, but it is >200mb (plus AFAIK it is compiled... does it also have an interpreter?)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

The part where it's compiled is what makes it have no dependencies to actually execute

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Why not give (Common)LISP a try?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Why does it need to be a scripting (by this I assume interpreted) language? For your requirements - particularly lightweight distribution - a precompiled binary seems more appropriate. Maybe look into Go, which is a pretty simple language that can be easily compiled to native binaries.

[–] gravitas_deficiency 2 points 2 months ago

Bro seriously just slap pyenv + pyenv-virtualenv on your systems and you’re good to go. They’re absolutely trivial to install. Iirc the latter is not a thing in windows, but if you’re stuck on windows for some reason and doing any serious scripting, you should be using WSL anyways.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It is possible to wrap something like python into a single file, which is extracted (using standard shell tools) into a tmpdir at runtime.

You might also consider languages that can compile to static binaries - something like nim (python like syntax), although you could also make use of nimscript. Imagine nimscript as your own extensible interpreter.

Similarly, golang has some extensible scripting languages like https://github.com/traefik/yaegi - go has the advantage of easy cross compiling if you need to support different machine architectures.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

You could use Ansible for automation just keep in mind it needs python.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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

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