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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...
I have created job schedulers/process managers in Julia. There are good facilities for these "systems" level tasks because Julia is based on the very portable libuv[1]. You're able to pipe processes around [2]. Interpolation into "shell command mode" has good ergonomics (like automatic safe escaping and quoting) and also solid semantics (for instance, you can write `-i$files` and it expands to `-ifile1 -ifile2` for an array [3]). I am unsure why there isn't a Cromwell [4] for Julia in the public domain yet...
[1]: https://libuv.org/
[2]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/running-external-pro...
[3]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/running-external-pro...
[4]: https://cromwell.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
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...
I wish there was something elaborated for scripts that run on Node. I've been using nbb[1] for scripting, and although it all runs through Node.js, it is fast and quick to prototype scripts. The best part is in CI I can simply `npx nbb path/to/script.cljs`. Things get clunky if I want to use anything about of the Node stdlib though, since then you need the dreaded node_modules folder around.
[1] https://github.com/babashka/nbb
