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Recommend me a scripting language (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Elixir checks most of those boxes. If you want a good functional scriptibg language, Elixir soynds like the go to. Some lisp language like guile should also be sufficient, and probably have a lighter footprint.

This requirement stands out though:

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)

Thats basically what ansible does. If you plan on doing this to multiple machines you should just use ansible. Also how do you plan on ensuring the scripting interpreter is installed on the machines?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Elixir is quite big (yeah, it's certainly smaller than something like java... sorry for not specifying what I mean by "small disk footprint").

Thats basically what ansible does. Thats basically what ansible does. If you plan on doing this to multiple machines you should just use ansible.

Ansible requires python on the target machine (or a lot of extra-hacky workarounds) so... I could just use python myself :)

BTW getting ansible to do anything besides the very straightforward usecases it was meant for is a huge pain (even a simple if/else is a pain) and it's also super-slow, so I hate it passionately.

Also how do you plan on ensuring the scripting interpreter is installed on the machines?

Ideally I'd just copy the interpreter over via ssh when needed (or install it via the local package manager, if it's available as a package)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

If python is too big for you and you're dealing with heterogeneous systems then you're probably stuck with sh as the lowest common denominator between those systems. I'm not aware of any scripting languages that are so portable you can simply install them with one file over scp.

Alternate route is to abandon a scripting interpreter completely and compile a static binary in something like Go and deploy the binary.

There was also some "compile to bash" programming languages that I've sneered at because I couldn't think of a use case but this might be one.