I think Ruby is a better choice over Python for a couple reasons in this case. 1) The syntax doesn’t rely on whitespace blocking, so it’s a little easier to use from the command-line, and via copy-paste scripting. 2) There are a lot of variations of ruby including very lightweight implementations that can be easily embedded in other applications, making it trivial to add basic Ruby support to an existing app without requiring a full set of development dependencies (see mruby) 3) Some of the syntax sugar creates some nice options for building single-file scripts and is more conducive to creating concise custom DSLs