You might enjoy lua or lune.

https://nim-lang.org/

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

Why not give (Common)LISP a try?

posix sh + awk for manipulating data?

You should probably check out Guile.

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.

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.

Not sure how big node footprint is but would fit the bill. Would only recommend if you wanna go into web dev career in the future tho 🙃