And then, python.
Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.
Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.
As a result, every command line bit of glue code I've written for the last decade or so has been in python. At a certain point, it does start to get unwieldy and you can indeed write some awful code in it, but then again, I've seen some pretty awful bash scripts too.
My favorite trick is the fact that you can tell python to
Then you write it again in a better language...
Python isn't appreciably faster than something like Typescript to someone with actual experience making programs professionally.
Ruby has the syntactic power to write stuff very succintly, lot of good apis (and some crappy too), had since its inception a good repl which perl always ignored..
There was a time, just before the rails boom, when ruby had a lot of traction in admins and that-era-devops circles
It's for non-programmers.