Quickly came to write "AWK!!!!!!!!!" but yeah... you don't want its superiority... 😜
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.
Why not give (Common)LISP a try?
posix sh + awk for manipulating data?
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.
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/
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)
@gomp Well no I know someone who does forth, not me really. Perhaps forth is just too low-level for anything except hardware drivers and so.
You could use Ansible for automation just keep in mind it needs python.
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.
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
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
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 https://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.
vlang might fit your request pretty nicely. It's a bit patchy in places but mainly stable and gets pretty frequent updates
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 🙃
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