What's a scripting language that doesn't suck?

Guile is really a typical Scheme. Starts out "minimal", then it turns out all the shit missing is actually useful, so it gets badly tacked on, fast forward ten years and the result is a turd. I guess being a GNU project and having its own army of braindead fanboys also did a big number.

Going to teach myself Tcl over the next couple of days. I have some simple tasks that are well suited to it, and will compare the Tcl solution with my Racket one.

Guile doesn't know what it wants to be. It started out as an embeddable language like Tcl, but turned into a standalone language like Python. I think at least part of the reason for this is the lack of a package manager, they had to include everything and the kitchen sink to make it possible to write portable useful scripts.

I'm still going to use it, it's a neat language, but for embedding there are better solutions. There is Tcl, Lua, and if you want to use a lisp there is Chibi Scheme and ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp).

Jesus christ it's like brainfuck but with words.

The only thing I can say for sure is that OP invested a lot of energy in learning sh and is letting his biases cloud his judgment.

Well, good luck. Also, there's an alternative interpreter called jimtcl if you want something small.

dont understand what is supposed to be so great about tcl. It looks like lua, just with worse syntax.

Also People using scripting languages that aren't sh for small scripts in my experience tend to try to reimplement everything in that scripting language, instead of using the language as glue. No idea why. You can call external programs (like sed, awk etc.) just as well from lua as you could from sh. I've seen it quite a few times by now.

The idea of having to call a host of separate programs like sed, awk etc is quite revolting to most people.

this was btw. not a shot at tcl, I'm genuinely curious why it's supposed to be good. redpill me on tcl

lol no it isn't