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.

  • Possibly linuxEnglish
    221·
    3 months ago

    Python is what you want. You can install it on just about any system.

    Other than that maybe Lua but that will be hell.

    • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
      56·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Possibly linuxEnglish
        44·
        3 months ago

        Perl isn’t normally preinstalled by Python is. (On Linux)

        • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
          10·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • Possibly linuxEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            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

          • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            If you just run perl it will sit waiting for input. Try perl --version

        • neomachino@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          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.

        • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Um, exactly the opposite on all the distros I use. All Enterprise Linux distros, Suse and Debian.