May be derailing discussion a little, but the nicest scripting language/environment I've ever used is Clojure's babashka[1].

Clojure's data first model + conveniences like the -> and ->> macros make simple data pipeline scripts a joy to write.

babashka of course suffers from the "it isn't everywhere" problem that is mentioned regarding python.

https://github.com/babashka/babashka