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.
nim is great, but it is >200mb (plus AFAIK it is compiled… does it also have an interpreter?)
The part where it’s compiled is what makes it have no dependencies to actually execute
No one has mentioned PHP yet? Man, times really have changed.
For data processing?
I used it for scripting a decade after everyone else, but even I have to admit PHP is rarely the best choice now.
Powershell, yeah I said it!
Wanted to say this too but it really depends on what you’re using it for.
Only good on Windows
Oh dude, you are so wrong!
Powershell is available for linux and will run the same modules that have made it such a success on Windows. Want to fire up vmware containers or get a list of vms? Want to talk to Exchange servers? Azure? AWX? $large-corporate-thing? Powershell is a very good tool for that, even if it smells very Microsofty.
The linux version works well - it has some quirks (excessive logging, a MS repo that needs manual approving that breaks automatic updates) but aside from those, it just works. I have several multi-year scripts that tick away nicely in the background.
The key features are missing. Powershell is great for active directory and LDAP. You don’t get that on Linux. It is just is a pain. Power shell is normally a pain but using on Linux is worse.
Can’t say I’ve noticed much pain beyond what I mention - powershell just works.
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.
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
Perl requres the perl interpreter and python requires a python interpreter. Why is it bad that groovy also needs a vm?
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?
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.
You should probably check out Guile.
(Chicken) Scheme.
Schemes have one of the best and most interactive interpreters Is general purpose, allows functional, procedural and OO programming, small disk size and compilable to native executables, Throughout documented and supplemented by years of research, simple setup.
It also is CGI compatible, if necessary.
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.
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.
Python is what you want. You can install it on just about any system.
Other than that maybe Lua but that will be hell.
Python is what you want. You can install it on just about any system.
Perl and bash are already there, no need to install anything.
Perl isn’t normally preinstalled by Python is. (On Linux)
Is this the case? I don’t feel like I’ve ever had to install Perl but I’ve had to install Python plenty of times and I use both pretty frequently on a daily basis. Not to mention a newer version, older version, 2.7.4 instead of 2.7.3.
Python 2 is no longer supported and shouldn’t be used.
Try it now - go on. Type “perl” and tell me what you get.
And if you’re so certain it’s not used, try removing it and see how well your computer works afterwards.
Welp, can’t argue with that
If you just run perl it will sit waiting for input. Try perl --version
It isn’t installed
I know that because I installed it as it was a dependency of Buildroot.
Edit: My bad I must of been thinking about a Perl library
You could use Ansible for automation just keep in mind it needs python.
You might enjoy lua or lune.
Quickly came to write “AWK!!!” but yeah… you don’t want its superiority… 😜
Powershell is the superior choice. But if you can’t even have bash you probably won’t have access.
Perl is already installed on most linux machines and unless you start delving into module usage, you won’t need to install anything else.
Python is more fashionable, but needs installing on the host and environments can get complicated. I don’t think it scales as well as Perl, if that’s a concern of yours.
Why not give (Common)LISP a try?
