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.
Perl requres the perl interpreter and python requires a python interpreter. Why is it bad that groovy also needs a vm?
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.
“heavy”. It’s 2024. We have gigabytes of storage on handheld phones. I don’t buy it.
I work at scale - deploying scripts to hundreds of linux machines and any package you install will be multiplied that many times on the backend storage. You don’t get the luxury of installing anything that isn’t essential.
Ohhh, you work at scale do you? With… “hundreds” of Linux servers? And 50MB, which is basically a rounding error for most storage solutions, will break your bank? Sure Jan.
Wow, you’re a dick.
Probably. But I’m not the one whining over like 5GB of data across “hundreds of systems” in 2024.
Last I checked, the JVM was larger than the standard Perl and Python interpreters, and had a much worse startup time (which is bad for short scripts).
Sorry - what potato from the '90s are you running software on these days?
Dude, I’ve worked with all these interpreters. The JVM’s startup is slow, although there’s been some improvement since the version 1.1 that I started out with. The interpreter speed is quite good once it gets going, so it remains a good choice for long-running or interactive programs where the startup is insignificant as a fraction of total program run-time, but if you’re running a script that takes only a fraction of a second to execute, the JVM’s startup can lengthen the time by an order of magnitude or more. Horses for courses and all that—I wouldn’t write a complex interactive GUI program in Perl, either.