People hate on it, but do you know what language would be perfect these days?
Easy shelling - check.
Easily embeddable - check
Easily sandboxable - check.
Reasonably rich standard library - check.
High level abstractions - check.
If you're still guessing what language it is, it's Tcl. Good old Tcl.
It's just that is syntax is moderately weird and the documentation available for it is so ancient and creaky that you can sometimes see mummies through the cracks.
Tcl would pretty much solve all these pipeline issues, but it's not a cool language.
I really wish someone with a ton of money and backing would create "TypeTcl" on top of Tcl (à la Typescript and Javascript) and market it to hell and back, create brand new documentation for it, etc.
I'd rather see an Lua successor reach widespread adoption. Wren pretty much solved all my gripes with Lua but there is no actively maintained Java implementation.
How is the Windows support? One of my big needs for any general-purpose build system is that I can get a single build that works on both Windows and POSIX. Without using WSL.
That said, you're right, at least at first blush, tcl is an attractive, if easy to forget, option.
Windows support? Great as far as I can tell. ActiveTcl, the Windows distribution, has been a thing for several decades now. I remember using it back in 2008.
Easy shelling - check.
Easily embeddable - check
Easily sandboxable - check.
Reasonably rich standard library - check.
High level abstractions - check.
If you're still guessing what language it is, it's Tcl. Good old Tcl.
It's just that is syntax is moderately weird and the documentation available for it is so ancient and creaky that you can sometimes see mummies through the cracks.
Tcl would pretty much solve all these pipeline issues, but it's not a cool language.
I really wish someone with a ton of money and backing would create "TypeTcl" on top of Tcl (à la Typescript and Javascript) and market it to hell and back, create brand new documentation for it, etc.