What are the best scripting languages for writing shell scripts?

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Jan 24, 2020

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10 Options Considered

Best scripting languages for writing shell scripts	Price	Platforms	Current stable version
-- Bash	-	-	-
-- Python	-	Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS	3.8.1 and 2.7.16
-- Tcl	Free	-	-
-- Lua	-	Windows, Mac, Android	-
-- Ruby	-	-	2.6.0

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score 13 · Answer 1

Bash

Top Pro

Default shell on most systems

Bash is the default shell on virtually every UNIX system. Making it very portable across different systems and once you get used to it, you can use it everywhere. See More

Top Con

No out-of-the-box command autocompletion

To have command autocompletion in bash you need to install third-party plug-ins. See More

Top Pro

Plenty of examples and tutorials

Since this is very mature shell there is a lot of great examples and other resources describing how to do almost everything. See More

Top Con

Lags behind on features compared to ZSH and Fish

People who wants power features or to customize their shell experience use zsh or fish. See More

Top Pro

Always available

Top Pro

POSIX compatible

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities

BASH scripting is a rich and robust language. See More

Top Pro

Recursive globbing

ls **/*.log for example is supported by Bash if you set shopt -s globstar. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Want to run something 5 times? Write a throw-away loop: for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do date; done If you need it 100 times? Not a problem: for i in {1..100}; do date; done or: for ((i=0; i<100; ++i)); do date; done How about emailing yourself when remote server is back online? Sure thing: while ! ping -c1 example.com &>/dev/null; do date; sleep 5; done && mailx -s 'server is back!' me@myself.com See More

Top Pro

Simpler and more expressive than OOP language

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score 14 · Answer 2

Python

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Python's syntax is very clear and readable, making it excellent for beginners. The lack of extra characters like semicolons and curly braces reduces distractions, letting beginners focus on the meaning of the code. Significant whitespace also means that all code is properly and consistently indented. The language also uses natural english words such as 'and' and 'or', meaning that beginners need to learn fewer obscure symbols. On top of this, Python's dynamic type system means that code isn't cluttered with type information, which would further distract beginners from what the code is doing. See More

Top Con

Sometime slow execution time

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS

Current stable version:3.8.1 and 2.7.16

GZipped size:22.5MB

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

See All Specs

Top Pro

Widely available

Top Con

Not installed as default on most Linux distributions

Top Pro

Good documentation

The Python community has put a lot of work into creating excellent documentation filled with plain english describing functionality. Contrast this with other languages, such as Java, where documentation often contains a dry enumeration of the API. As a random example, consider GUI toolkit documentation - the tkinter documentation reads almost like a blog article, answering questions such as 'How do I...', whereas Java's Swing documentation contains dry descriptions that effectively reiterate the implementation code. On top of this, most functions contain 'Doc Strings', which mean that documentation is often immediately available, without even the need to search the internet. See More

Top Con

Significant whitespace

While proper formatting is essential for any programmer, beginners often have trouble understanding the need and lack the discipline to do it. Add to that all those editors that randomly convert N spaces (usually 8) to tabs and you get an instant disaster. You may need to find yourself an editor/IDE you like and carry it with you on a thumb drive, which isn't a bad idea anyway. See More

Top Pro

Comes with extensive libraries

Python ships with a large standard library, including modules for everything from writing graphical applications, running servers, and doing unit testing. This means that beginners won't need to spend time searching for tools and libraries just to get started on their projects. See More

Top Con

Speed can matter

Python, like many interpreted and untyped languages, is fairly slow compared to compiled languages like C, C++ or Java. Sometimes this won't matter, but when it does you're talking about twenty times slower than C/C++ and ten times slowed than Java. You need to have a plan for what you will do if it is too slow. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials

Python's popularity and beginner friendliness has led to a wealth of tutorials and example code on the internet. This means that when beginners have questions, they're very likely to be able to find an answer on their own just by searching. This is a huge advantage even over languages specifically designed for beginners, which often lack in tutorials, examples, and other resources due to their lack of professional use. See More

Top Con

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Although the principals of multi-threading in Python are good, the simplicity can be deceptive and multi-threaded applications are not always easy to create when multiple additional factors are accounted for. Multi-thread processes have to be explicitly created manually. See More

Top Pro

Support of several programming paradigms

Python supports more than one programming paradigm.There is much debate amongst programmers over which programming paradigm is best. Python supports three 'styles' of programming: Procedural programming. Object orientated programming. Functional programming. All three styles can be seamlessly interchanged and can be learnt in harmony in Python rather than being forced into one point of view. See More

Top Con

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

While it's a good language to learn and use after you have mastered a couple of other less rigid programming languages, it's definitely not good for first-time learners. Both the language itself and its community have made it quite clear that you should do everything the "Pythonic way" to get the best results, that it feels more like an opinionated framework instead of a general-purpose programming language, which means if you are a first-time learner and getting too "tuned" to the "Pythonic way" it will be much harder for you to learn other less-opinionated languages compared to the other way around. Like any programming languages and/or frameworks, I'd recommend first-time learners to learn less opinionated ones first to open up your mind, then learn some of the more opinionated ones to increase productivity for specific fields of works. After all, programming languages are just some utilities for the human mind to interface with the computers, and there are more suitable tools for different tasks, and you should master the "Pythonic way" (after you already have adequate experience in computer programming) instead of locking your mind too close to the "Pythonic way" as a first-time learner. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get started

On top of the wealth of tutorials and documentation, and the fact that it ships with a sizeable standard library, Python also ships with both an IDE (Integrated Development Environment: A graphical environment for editing running and debugging your code); as well as a text-based live interpreter. Both help users to get started trying out code immediately, and give users immediate feedback that aids learning. See More

Top Con

Might not be very future-proof

Lots of features that will probably be crucial as time goes (good support for parallelism for example) are missing or are not that well-supported in Python. Since 2.x and 3.x still exist, be prepared to switch if something makes 3.x take off in the future. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Installs and works on every major operating systems if not already installed by default (Linux, macOS). See More

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since Python is a dynamically typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using Python as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This also will cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Static typing via mypy

Python's syntax supports optional type annotations for use with a third-party static type checker, which can catch a certain class of bugs at compile time. This also makes it easier for beginners to gradually transition to statically typed languages instead of wrestling with the compiler from the start. See More

Top Con

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Top Pro

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. See More

Top Con

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Once you have you program the process of having a way to send it to others to use is fragile and fragmented. Python is still looking for the right solution for this with still differences in opinion. These differences are a huge counter to Python's mantra of "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." See More

Top Pro

Good introduction to data structures

Python's built-in support and syntax for common collections such as lists, dictionaries, and sets, as well as supporting features like list comprehensions, foreach loops, map, filter, and others, makes their use much easier to get into for beginners. Python's support for Object Orient Programming, but with dynamic typing, also makes the topic of Data Structures much more accessible, as it takes the focus off of more tedious aspects, such as type casting and explicitly defined interfaces. Python's convention of only hiding methods through prefacing them with underscores further takes the focus off of details such as Access Modifiers common in languages such as Java and C++, allowing beginners to focus on the core concepts, without much worry for language specific implementation details. See More

Top Con

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages.

i.e. running js as a script in a node is trivial. Even languages that were not meant to run as a script are easy to use as a scripting language with just a .sh file. See More

Top Pro

Very similar to pseudo-code

When learning Computer Science concepts such as algorithms and data structures, many texts use pseudo-code. Having a language such as Python whose syntax is very similar to pseudo-code is an obvious advantage that makes learning easier. See More

Top Con

Unflexible userbase

You will be expected to rigidly stick to the coding practices and to do everything by-the-numbers. One of the most common complaints I heard from people who left Plone, which is Python based, to Drupal, which is PHP based, is the community is more like a frat house than a community. If you look for help, make sure you follow the rules of whatever type of group you are requesting help from. See More

Top Pro

Can be used in many domains

Python can be used across virtually all domains: scientific, network, games, graphics, animation, web development, machine learning, and data science. See More

Top Con

Limited support for functional programming

While Python imports some very useful and elegant bits and pieces from FP (such as list comprehensions, higher-order functions such as map and filter), the language's support for FP falls short of the expectations raised by included features. For example, no tail call optimisation or proper lambdas. Referential transparency can be destroyed in unexpected ways even when it seems to be guaranteed. Function composition is not built into the core language. Etc. See More

Top Con

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Python is abstracted far enough that if it's your first language, it will be harder to pick up lower level languages later versus going the other direction. See More

Top Con

Hard to debug other people's code

As the structure of Python code is based on conventions many developers are not following them and so it is difficult to follow/extract the design of not trivial application from the code. While this is a con, I see it in other languages as well. It seems to depend on the programmer. Most people don't learn conventions first, they just start programming. Unless you work for someone who insists you follow the conventions, you will probably go with what you like. You might never look at the conventions. See More

Top Con

Language fragmentation

A large subset of the Python community still uses / relies upon Python 2, which is considered a legacy implementation by the Python authors. Some libraries still have varying degrees of support depending on which version of Python you use. There are syntactical differences between the versions. See More

Top Con

Inelegant and messy language design

The first impression given by well-chosen Python sample code is quite attractive. However, very soon a lack of unifying philosophy / theory behind the language starts to show more and more. This includes issues with OOP such as lack of consistency in the use of object methods vs. functions (e.g., is it x.sort() or sorted(x), or both for lists?), made worse by too many functions in global name space. Method names via mangling and the init(self) look and feel like features just bolted on an existing simpler language. See More

Top Con

Not good for mobile development

You can use frameworks like Kivy, but if your ultimate goal is to write mobile apps Python may not be the best first choice. See More

See All

score 13 · Answer 3

Tcl

Top Pro

Widely available

You can expect a reasonably recent version of Tcl to either installed or available in the repositories of any popular open source *nix. See More

Serg G. Brester's Experience

I use it more as 20 years as primary scripting language for huge list of tasks - from desktop to web or server applications, networking, administration, analyse, automation, testing and many more. See More

Top Pro

Standard library

Unlike *sh Tcl has a rich standard library. See More

Top Pro

Sane quoting rules

Unlike in sh you don't need to quote your variable substitutions ('"$1"'). Expanding of arguments occurs mostly explicit and if yet expected in-place (e. g. using eval or subst) it follows strict and well clear rules. So exec test $argv would execute test with single argument. And appending {*} before $argv would execute test with all arguments (list expansion). See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

With a little care you can have the same script work on Linux, *BSD, OS X and Windows. See More

Top Pro

Everything is a string

Tcl can operate at the same level of abstraction as the POSIX shell, which makes it easier to manipulate the output of other programs. See More

Top Pro

Tk and Expect

Top Pro

Standalone packages

Tcl enables easy deployment through self-contained binaries known as starpacks. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Want to run something 5 times? Here you go: set i 0; time { puts done-[incr i] } 5 If you need real conditional cycle? Not a problem: for {set ready 0; set i 1} {$i <= 100 && !$ready} {incr i} { if {[exec do-some-thing] eq "ready" } {set ready 1} } Want to measure performance of something or repeat it max 300 times and not longer than 1 seconds? Very simple: timerate { after 20 } 1000 300 How about notifying yourself when some http-server is back online? Sure thing: while {[catch { close [socket localhost 80] }]} { after 1000 }; puts "\7\7\7ONLINE!" And you can do it also fully asynchronously using events etc. See More

See All

score 6 · Answer 4

Lua

Top Pro

Straightforward and simple

Lua's syntax is considered to be one of the closest syntax to plain English. Lua's syntax is also very simple and straightforward. Because of this, you can quickly write code without much fuss, and is part of the reason why it's so popular as an embedded scripting language in many video games. See More

Top Con

Not very commonly used outside of the Game Industry

Lua is used very often as an extension language for video games, but outside of that niche, it doesn't see much use in industry. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Android

Top Pro

Fast and lightweight

Lua is light and faster than most other scripting languages, especially with LuaJIT, a Lua compiler that can even run code faster than some compiled programming languages in some cases. See More

Top Con

1-indexed Arrays

Defying conventions from most other programming languages, Lua uses arrays that start at 1, rather than 0. While seemingly beginner friendly, this can complicate some logic, and sets beginners up for confusion when looking at code from other languages. See More

Top Pro

Portable

Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler. Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation). When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K. The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers. See More

Top Con

Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages

Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages. Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages. See More

Top Pro

Prototype based object oriented programming

Prototype based OOP was designed to be a more clear and easy to understand alternative to class based OOP, the creators of prototypes seeing classes as an unnecessary and complex way of handling classes. As such, it may be an ideal way to introduce a beginner to OOP concepts. See More

Top Con

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

The official Lua documentation is very helpful and thorough. There are also a large number of online resources or books with lots of helpful information for beginners and advanced users alike. See More

Top Con

Batteries not included

Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight. See More

Top Pro

Embeddable

Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use. See More

Top Pro

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming. The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics: Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)). Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()). See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Lua is simple and easy to learn. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can: Implement critical parts in C Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page: LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C. See More

Top Pro

Prototype-based inheritance

Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages. See More

See All

score 3 · Answer 5

Ruby

Top Pro

A Large Ecosystem of tools & libraries

Ruby has a large ecosystem of tools and libraries for just about every use. Such as ORMs (Active Record, DatabMapper), Web Application Frameworks(Rails, Sinatra, Volt), Virtualization Orchestration(docker-api, drelict), CLI tools(Thor, Commando), GUI Frameworks(Shoes, FXRuby) and the list goes on. If you can think of it, there is probably a gem for that ( and if not you can create your own and share with the community). See More

Top Con

Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class. In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.6.0

GZipped size:15.9 MB

Site:https://www.ruby-lang.org

Price:Open Source (Free)

Top Pro

Elegant syntax

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 6

POSIX shell

Top Pro

Faster than Bash

Scripts written in POSIX sh can be executed with Dash which is optimized for performance. See More

Top Pro

Portable

Runs on literally all POSIX platforms (or should). See More

score 3 · Answer 7

PowerShell

Top Pro

Multi platform

Powershell Core works on Windows, Linux and Mac. There is also an open source implementation Pash which allows the same language to be run on other OSes. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Answer 8

Nim

Platforms:Windows, MacOS/iOS, Linux /Android/Termux, *BSD, Solaris/SmartOS, HaikuOS, lots of others

Current stable version:1.0.4

GZipped size:13 MB

Site:https://nim-lang.org

See All Specs

score 1 · Answer 9

Javascript

Top Pro

No installation required

If you run a web browser you already have JavaScript installed and can get started right away. Modern browsers such as Chrome also have very powerful programming consoles built into them. Aside from the browser console, you can also use online Javascript playgrounds such as JS Bin and JS Fiddle. Even from a tablet. See More

Top Con

Many errors pass silently

JavaScript looks for every possible way to treat the code you write as runnable and is very reluctant to point out likely errors. For example, you have call a function with too many arguments, the extra arguments are simply discarded. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

ECMAScript Modules:Available (as a flag) (only on Node 8.x-10.x)

Version(LTS):8.x

See All Specs

Top Pro

Great ecosystem

JavaScript has one of the largest programming ecosystems, as shown by the being the most popular language for projects on GitHub. As there are so many projects written in JavaScript there are lots of libraries available to build off of and many of them are written to be easy to use and integrate into other projects. There are also lots of resources available for learning JavaScript. Other than traditional tutorials, language learning sites such as Codecademy have JavaScript courses. The Mozilla Developer Database also serves as a great resource for learning about the standard libraries built into JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Limited standard library

Much often needed functionality is not in the standard library. See More

Top Pro

Allows for easy asynchronous spawning

Top Pro

Easy to jump into

The C-like syntax makes it very similar to other popular programming languages, and the fact that it's untyped also makes it a very easy language to just jump into and start learning. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 10

Perl

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Top Con

Executable line noise

Top Pro

Powerful string matching abilities

Top Con

Too much syntactic sugars

Top Pro

Very fast excecution time

usually 5 times faster than Python and 10 times TCL See More

Top Con

Hard to decipher

Top Pro

Interface to all of POSIX routines

Top Con

TMTOWTDI (There's more than one way to do it)

Top Pro

Tons of modules (CPAN)

Top Pro

Large community (forums, irc)

Top Pro

Native and powerful regex engine

See All

10 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Bash

My Recommendation for Bash

Default shell on most systems

No out-of-the-box command autocompletion

Plenty of examples and tutorials

Lags behind on features compared to ZSH and Fish

Always available

POSIX compatible

Rich scripting capabilities

Recursive globbing

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Simpler and more expressive than OOP language

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Clear syntax

Sometime slow execution time

Widely available

Not installed as default on most Linux distributions

Good documentation

Significant whitespace

Comes with extensive libraries

Speed can matter

Lots of tutorials

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Support of several programming paradigms

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

Easy to get started

Might not be very future-proof

Cross-platform

Does not teach you about data types

Static typing via mypy

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

It's really simple

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Good introduction to data structures

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages.

Very similar to pseudo-code

Unflexible userbase

Can be used in many domains

Limited support for functional programming

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Hard to debug other people's code

Language fragmentation

Inelegant and messy language design

Not good for mobile development

My Recommendation for Tcl

My Recommendation for Tcl

Widely available

Standard library

Sane quoting rules

Cross-platform

Everything is a string

Tk and Expect

Standalone packages

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

My Recommendation for Lua

My Recommendation for Lua

Straightforward and simple

Not very commonly used outside of the Game Industry

Fast and lightweight

1-indexed Arrays

Portable

Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages

Prototype based object oriented programming

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

Great documentation

Batteries not included

Embeddable

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

Easy to learn

Fast

Prototype-based inheritance

My Recommendation for Ruby

My Recommendation for Ruby

A Large Ecosystem of tools & libraries

Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

Elegant syntax

My Recommendation for POSIX shell

My Recommendation for POSIX shell