Linux

You might enjoy lua or lune.

Python.

Just remember to use pyenv for interpreter installation, version and environment management. It's pretty straightforward that way and you have predictability.

Don't ever manually fiddle with the system python and/or libraries or you'll break your system. You should just rely on the package manager for that.

Why not give (Common)LISP a try?

Perl would be my candidate for more advanced text handling than what sh can do.

Never used Lua but I think it's fun.

If nothing else works, just learn C/Rust. There's plenty of that on Linux systems, I think you'll be able to manage. Yes, it doesn't meet a lot of your requirements.

https://nim-lang.org/

You should probably check out Guile.

As for languages intended to be run as a script first and foremost, consider powershell. It's object oriented (and not, like other script languages, just serialising/deserialising everything to JSON under the hood). The syntax takes some time getting used to, but it's cross-platform, quite powerful, and has very good editor support.

Something I haven't seen here yet, but may be worth considering: several programming languages support invoking the compiler to run a source file rather than compile it into a binary.

Go may be worth trying as a Python replacement. It's strictly a programming language, but the language has been written to make it fast to compile. For simple scripts, there's not much difference between the startup time for Python and a compiler invocation of Go.

If you want a more functional programming, Kotlinscript may be to your liking (though that comes with a rather large JVM+compiler dependency that's not very portable). Kotlinscript is basically Kotlin (the programming language) executed like a script by putting the Kotlin compiler in the hashbang.

Similarly, Java can these days also be executed like a script if you invoke it as java some-script.java. Using Java like this doesn't allow for importing dependencies, though, which you may want if you ever need to process JSON.

These compilers aren't single binaries, but they are available as normal OS packages on most modern distros.

If you want to optimisme for "I want to copy a statically linked file to an alpine container", maybe look into fish or zsh.

For some types of data manipulation, PHP may be a good fit. It's not just for web development, although many of its more optimised features are designed for that. Useful features include clear iterations over maps/dictionaries, quite strong static types it you bother to put them in the script, and lots of examples of how to accomplish something online.

Typescript can also be invoked directly these days, and it's even better than PHP (and arguably most programming languages) when it comes to types. I find the time it takes for the JS VM to initialise frustrating, but maybe more modern interpreters such as deno do better in this regard.

Quickly came to write "AWK!!!!!!!!!" but yeah... you don't want its superiority... 😜

posix sh + awk for manipulating data?

Bro seriously just slap pyenv + pyenv-virtualenv on your systems and you’re good to go. They’re absolutely trivial to install. Iirc the latter is not a thing in windows, but if you’re stuck on windows for some reason and doing any serious scripting, you should be using WSL anyways.

perl might be on all your systems. It’s kind-of a legacy, but still actively developed. It’s not a great language: it looks like bash scripting on steroids. But if you just need to write some small scripts with a language more powerful than awk or bash, it does the job. If perl isn’t on all of your systems already, then I would choose a better scripting language.

Could use a hipster shell like fish, nushell or elvish. I know the latter two have the functional support you're looking for.

You could use Ansible for automation just keep in mind it needs python.

Why does it need to be a scripting (by this I assume interpreted) language? For your requirements - particularly lightweight distribution - a precompiled binary seems more appropriate. Maybe look into Go, which is a pretty simple language that can be easily compiled to native binaries.

It is possible to wrap something like python into a single file, which is extracted (using standard shell tools) into a tmpdir at runtime.

You might also consider languages that can compile to static binaries - something like nim (python like syntax), although you could also make use of nimscript. Imagine nimscript as your own extensible interpreter.

Similarly, golang has some extensible scripting languages like https://github.com/traefik/yaegi - go has the advantage of easy cross compiling if you need to support different machine architectures.

vlang might fit your request pretty nicely. It's a bit patchy in places but mainly stable and gets pretty frequent updates

@gomp Small footprint? Why not try forth. https://forth-standard.org/

Not sure how big node footprint is but would fit the bill. Would only recommend if you wanna go into web dev career in the future tho 🙃