lawpoop

I notice that a number of shell utilities are written in c. I have some ideas for some utilities, but I won't be learning c anytime soon. And, it would seem to introduce a level of low level concerns, such a memory management, that would be a pain for a small, simple utility.

What high level language would you recommend for writing a utility? Off the top of my head, it seems that python and ruby would be the top contenders. Bash itself seems to simple to write a decent sized utility in; I understand things like arrays are cumbersome