What I really want for scripting usecases is a language that has modern language concepts (easy to use arrays and maps, text formatting strings, etc) but that allows me to call commands as easily as I could call functions. Maybe there are existing scripting langs that make this so? Ambers approach is not bad but I feel it could be even better.
use IPC::System::Simple qw(capture);
use Sub::Install qw(install_sub);
foreach my $command (qw(foo bar baz)) {
install_sub $command => sub { capture($command, @_) }
}
...
my $output = foo($x, $y); # will throw if calling 'foo $x $y' returns non-zero
Note that if you're distributing code p3rl.org/App::FatPacker will produce a single fat script that has (pure perl) dependencies included so you don't need to install anything (except for having a perl VM in $PATH).
There's also multiple libraries that provide a '$' function in JS (which may be why amber picked that delimeter) and then you can do
let output = await $`foo ${x} ${y}`;
Note that bun.sh has a 'bun compile' subcommand that bolts together your (pure JS) code and the static bun binary to produce a single file you can also copy around.
I'd suggest avoiding backticks in ... everything. In shell, $() is nicer, and both perl's and ruby's backticks require effort to use safely.
No idea re python but I see no reason you couldn't do the function generation thing if you wanted to, and somebody's probably librarified it already.