[rurban]

The problem is not doing anything serious. Of course this would need an updated language runtime.

The problem is doing something simple, like an installer. bash => zsh: fine. You can still install with the old /bin/bash. but for many cases a shell is not enough, and then you have to compile something statically for a trivial dynamic task. Which makes the download 10x larger. Not cool.

[tlrobinson]

It seems like there’s an opportunity for a lightweight statically-linked scripting language. Something between Go and Python.

[rurban]

The standard toolkit for this is perl. It's used in automake, most gnu utils and git. python and ruby bring nothing new to the table, besides being newbie friendlier.