This is the first time I’ve heard of Deno, but I’m not sure that having to install a 110Mb JS VM + runtime is more convenient in my context than simply using Python which is already guaranteed to available on any system I use and does all I need.

I can assure you it is 100x more convenient. One command to install it that has worked every single time I’ve done it, vs the hell that is Python installation. It’s meme-level bad..

Granted that was written before uv existed, and UV makes things a lot better in general. One thing it still isn’t great at though is installing Python. E.g. the binary Python distributions it can install never look for SSL certificates in the right (read: different on every Linux distro) places, so HTTPS doesn’t work.

If you actually want to install the latest version of Python on Linux (so you can’t use distro packages), the official solution is to build it from source. Which mercifully is easy (very surprising given the rest of Python), but still!

Is Typescript a better language than Python?

Not uniformly (e.g. arbitrary precision integers are the right choice for ad-hoc scripting, and Python’s support for lists, dictionaries, and filter/map is arguably nicer). Overall though, absolutely.

I definitely wouldn’t use Rust - or any other compiled language - for scripting.

Why not? It’s really good for shell scripting type stuff (executing commands, manipulating files, etc.).