It’s not a popular choice for it, but PHP is also fantastic for the sort of things described in this article. A relatively recent version is pre-installed on many *nixes, it has a decent enough (and gradual) type system, and standard library absolutely chock full of functionality (albeit very self-inconsistent in naming and structure) for dealing with files, JSON, making network requests, etc.

And because it’s not compiled, you can just whack a hashbang at the top of the file and chmod it to be executable.