Python with strict type checking and its huge stdlib is my favourite scripting language now.
That's quite a lot of ifs though. Tbh I haven't found anything significantly better for scripting though. Deno is pretty nice but Typescript really has just as many warts as Python. At least it isn't so dog slow.
But when I say "scripting" I don't mean shell scripting. I mean stuff like complex custom build systems or data processing pipelines. I would never do those in any shell language.
It's just object-y enough to be excellent at filtering and shunting and translating records from API endpoints to CSV files to SQL data rows, etc. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anybody to pick up because of all the sharp ends (eg it uses Javascript falseyness except SQL NULL has the ADO.Net "DBNull" which isn't falsey) but because I'm so familiar with it I find it quite good at that stuff.
As much as people bag on the syntax (like the operators all starting with hyphen, and all the .NET functions speak with an accent), the real problem is how many edge-cases are in there, like strange behaviors of the error stream, overcomplicated scope rules, FileSystem providers for the registry and SQL server and other objects no reasonable person would ever want to use as a "file", empty-array objects getting silently converted into null, etc.
It's time to try Scala 3 with Java libs' inbound interop: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/book/scala-features.html