I’ve always meant to write a post about this. Bun is pretty similar and has the `$` helper from dax built in. In the past I would have used Python for scripts that were too complicated for Bash. But the type system in Python is still not great. TypeScript’s is great: flexible, intuitive, powerful inference so you don’t have to do many annotations. And Deno with URL imports mean you can have a single-file script with external dependencies and it just works. (Python does this now too with inline dependencies and uv run.) Deno and Bun also come with decent APIs that are not quite a standard library but help a lot. Deno has a stdlib too.

https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/std/

You can see in my other scripts in my dotfiles that between dax for shelling out and cliffy or commander.js as a CLI builder, TS is a great language for building little CLIs.

https://github.com/david-crespo/dotfiles/tree/main/bin