administrative-scripting-with-julia VS janet

I appreciate the "Why You Shouldn't Use Julia for Administrative Scripts" section[0] which asked exactly the questions I would have asked.

The choice of (non-Bash) language to write command line utilities is in a bit of odd spot right now. Python is basically almost everywhere installed but the dependency on runtime + venv oddities bring their own set of problems. Java has the same runtime need issues though things might improve with initiatives regarding native binary compilation (though including the runtime may not produce exactly lightweight executables). Perl used to be a hot favorite in this space but I don't think lot of people are writing new stuff in Perl even though it is still present by default almost everywhere. Go is almost perfect here except I don't want to deal with 3x the boilerplate. Personally I think Rust isn't a bad choice (libraries like clap hugely reduce the boilerplate) but the learning curve makes it a harder sell (even though for basic utilities, I don't think there would be too much wrestling with the borrow checker). Another choice that comes to mind is Nim; I think it is very well positioned except a lot of people don't know even about it so its a hard sell + even among those who know, everyone is looking at everyone else to take the initiative to adopt it in a corporate environment at a non-trivial scale.

[0]: https://github.com/ninjaaron/administrative-scripting-with-j...

My question is actually not what everyone uses, but what is best suited for the task. Those two things are, of course, almost always different, because the average person is anything but smart. Here you see that Julia is indeed better suited for handling data than Bash: https://github.com/ninjaaron/administrative-scripting-with-julia And here you see that Lisp will be the best scripting language for certain persons: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1879617-larry-wall-is-lisp-a-candidate-for-a-scripting-language-whil/ Obviously, if you don't have in-depth experience with both languages, you don't have to answer my question.

Seems like a perfect use-case for Janet. (https://janet-lang.org/) A fast minimal VM like Lua, but even more extensible than Lua by being a "Lisp" with macro and C extension capabilities. Not a true Lisp, it's very pragmatic and performance-oriented. But it keeps the good stuff.

You might be looking for: https://janet-lang.org/

It comes with a build tool `jpm` which installs dependencies globally by default, but you can have it be installed in your project folder as well.

I like Clojure, but I never had any good opportunities to use it other than for a few small hobby projects. It is unfortunate that it is so huge with tons of dependencies and no simpler native implementation. I started looking at various LISPs and Schemes to find something lighter to use instead and ended up settling for Janet that I think is Clojure-like enough to be comfortable to use, but in a small native binary with no dependencies and can be embedded in other native programs. I am sure for big, real, projects that Clojure makes more sense, but for my hobby projects and scripts I do not think I will install it again. I am still happy for the things I learned from learning Clojure. It was a real eye-opener for an old OO-programmer.

https://janet-lang.org/

One might also check out Janet for quick scripting tasks.

https://janet-lang.org

Thanks!

I thought about another multiplatform, homoiconic, highly compact language: https://janet-lang.org/ (takes 803 kb on my machine).

It has no types though.

Racket is great, and if you like it you might find Rash interesting:

https://rash-lang.org/

Janet and Gerbil Scheme are also worth a look:

https://janet-lang.org/

https://cons.io/

Point here is that, for instance Janet language does not have cons / pair type but tuple (and so is lispoid, not lisp), but clearly this is sufficient for macros & hence seamless language construction: all you need is to be a lispoid although being a lisp gives another useful feature.