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.

Quickly came to write "AWK!!!!!!!!!" but yeah... you don't want its superiority... 😜

Why not give (Common)LISP a try?

posix sh + awk for manipulating data?

You should probably check out Guile.

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.

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

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.

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

Powershell is the superior choice. But if you can't even have bash you probably won't have access.

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 🙃

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