This won't be popular but... NodeJS. It's easy to grab input from the CLI, "shelling out" isn't really all that bad and often I want to do some "business logic" type stuff in code really quick and I know the toolset very well. It's much faster for me to do stuff in JS even if it might be slightly slower to execute. Execution time is rarely what I'm optimizing for in one-off scripts or even things I might run on a regular basis. My ability to understand the code and make changes is valued much higher for me.