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.
Why aren’t python and bash be available in all your systems? Which languages would be?
I would’ve recommended python, otherwise perl or Haskell (maybe Haskell’s too big) or something, but now I’m worried that whatever reason makes python undoable also makes perl etc. undoable
Why aren’t python and bash be available in all your systems?
Among others, I run stuff on alpine and openwrt.
I don’t need to run these scripts everywhere (strictly speaking, I don’t need the homlab at all), but I was wondering if there’s something that I can adopt as a default goto solution without having to worry about how each system is packaged/configured.
As for python, I doubt the full version would fit in my router plus as said I don’t want to deal with libraries/virtualenvs/… and (in the future) with which distro comes with python3 vs pyton4 (2 vs 3 was enough). Openwrt does have smaller python packages, but then I would be using different implementations on different systems: again something I’d rather not deal with.
As for perl, it would be small enough, but I find it a bit archaic/esoteric (prejudice, I know), plus again I don’t want to deal with how every distro decides to package the different things (eg. openwrt has some 40+ packages for perl - if I were doing serious development that would be ok, but I don’t want to worry about that for just some scripts).
Sounds like you want MicroPython. It’s definitely available on OpenWrt and AlpineLinux and has a very small footprint.
If you don’t like Python, have a look at Lua/luajit.
