You might enjoy lua or lune.

(Chicken) Scheme.

Schemes have one of the best and most interactive interpreters Is general purpose, allows functional, procedural and OO programming, small disk size and compilable to native executables, Throughout documented and supplemented by years of research, simple setup.

It also is CGI compatible, if necessary.

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.

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.

You should probably check out Guile.

Why not give (Common)LISP a try?

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

https://nim-lang.org/

posix sh + awk for manipulating data?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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