It depends.

For system automation, there is no better option than a POSIX shell. (I don’t even have a bash. Problem solved.) I usually recommend Schily’s shells for that, unless you have a POSIX-compatible /bin/sh on your system.

For tasks which would be too complicated (but still absolutely need to be a script, not a binary file), I also use Perl or, rarely, Common Lisp (sbcl --script). Python is a bad language with a weird syntax and a laughable performance (also, dependency hell whenever you update).