I, and I imagine many others, have a wide collection of miscellaneous scripts to perform various tasks. "Scripts" in this case is defined as interpreted/not compiled/fast startup over runtime performance, shorter than ~150 LoC, and interacting heavily with the file system and/or other processes.

The go-to language for this in the past has been shell scripts, but I keep getting annoyed by weird bashisms, the way it handles errors, the way it handles any kind of non-string data (numbers are already a pain, and don't get me started on associative arrays). Which means I now have a hodgepodge of languages, including Ruby, Racket, and Janet, (and more bash) with no clear idea of which to use when.

Ruby has the backtick syntax which allows running shell commands without a lot of hassle. Contrary to Python, where subprocess includes a lot of ceremony for basic tasks.

Janet is explicitly meant for scripting, but (1) I haven't really gotten into it, and (2) I have some doubts about the ecosystem and portability.

Racket has been quite nice, as it has a very fully featured standard library & package ecosystem, and is reasonably widely supported.

I have also looked at:

- Elvish: seems to be more focussed on being a rich interactive shell, and somewhat niche
- Python: see the subprocess note above
- Oil: looks promising, but not sure about stability yet
- Haskell with shebang: just too much in every way
- Common Lisp with Roswell: might be an okay option? Haven't really tried

Another consideration I have not explored yet is the ability to build a library of useful utility functions, i.e. a decent module system.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying:

What do you use for scripting, and why?