Erlang is great, and I miss working with it, but I'd never want to write much in the way of 'quick scripts' with it. Something like Ruby feels much more productive for that.
Even if GraalVM fixes startup times aren't JVM languages just too long-winded for scripting? Perl, Python and Ruby dominate the scripting world for a reason - standard libraries for file, dir and pathname manipulation written in a concise language. Scripting is a style of coding, not just a means to an end. It is here that dynamic languages excel. Clojure is the leanest of the JVMs but doesn't it still rely on Java for file, dir and pathname manipulation?
> Even if GraalVM fixes startup times aren't JVM languages just too long-winded for scripting? Perl, Python and Ruby dominate the scripting world for a reason
Ruby is a JVM language, in that JRuby is a very complete competitive, current, and widely-used-in-production Ruby implementation.
You should definitely educate yourself about Groovy. It's my favorite scripting language, particularly because it enables a true scripting style, but actually works well as a full application development language too (though I would always want a backbone of static typed code).
Joker is a Clojure dialect which is interpreted, thus it starts super fast (but runs slower, but fast enough for scripts). Its design is to be batteries included for all things scripting. So it's just a self contained executable with everything you need for scripting. It's implemented in Go.
I use it wherever I would have used bash or powershell prior.
There is also Babashka: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka which is a similar idea, it's an interpreted dialect of Clojure with fast start times designed for scripting. The difference with Joker is that it is newer and more experimental, and it is implemented in JVM Clojure, compiled with GraalVM and has no Windows support for now.
Anyways, I really recommend the use of Joker. Its awesome for scripting. I just put its binary in all my bin folders and script with it. It's great.
GraalVM does in fact fix that. There's a (new-ish) project called babashka that lets you do some basic scripting for example: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka
Oh certainly. I've done production work with Erlang, and it's great for building systems. I also love the Prolog syntax (I've also since done some side projects in Prolog for great fun).
Why I suggested Elixir is because it has all the strengths of Erlang but is also a better scripting language, and would compete better with Raku on a more equal footing in that respect.
In fact Elixir and Erlang are the only reasonably known dynamic languages that differentiate on concurrency. The rest either do higher order event loop concurrency, which is ok, but not a differentiator, or do worse, shared memory multithreading (threads, coroutines with synchronous channels, mutexes, etc.)
I don't really know what "differentiate" means, but Clojure has support for CSP-channel style with core.async, shared-memory with transactions using atoms/refs, and actor-ish style with the agents.
