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 similar runtime needs though things might improve with initiatives regarding native binary compilation (though including the runtime may not produce exactly lightweight executables) - also, not super popular among the younger crowd. 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 use Deno for this. It's the only scripting system where you can actually have a single file script with no compilation needed and use third party libraries reliably.

You also get great static types which is nice.

Deno is pretty nice for that. There are other systems that automatically satisfy dependencies for single-file scripts. I have gathered a list at https://dbohdan.com/scripts-with-dependencies. I am not sure about their individual reliability, because I have only written one example for most of them, but some are old, have users who rely on them for work, or both.

Great list! I tried a couple of these and found a big issue is IDE support - might be worth checking which ones have IDE support.

Also it seems like F# and C# should be on the list (see other comments in this thread).

It didn't cross my mind to add IDE information. (I don't use an IDE, which may be a mistake. I want to give IntelliJ IDEA a serious try.) I'll be honest: I probably won't add this information. Sorry. N projects × M IDEs is a sizable number of fields to keep accurate by hand, and I've learned this kind of maintenance is best avoided.

I have tried https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script. It seemed like it could not download dependencies when you ran the script, only reference already installed dependencies. At that point I stopped and did not add it to the list, since it would not qualify. I may have been wrong. I have a mental note to look at it again.

I'll see what F# does. It may work differently from how I understood dotnet-script to work. (It isn't the criterion for inclusion, but as someone who enjoyed writing Standard ML and not so much Haskell, I am actually interested in F#.)