My go to for most of what you mention is Go, but that’s obviously a compiled language and not for scripting. Or is it - What do you think about https://github.com/traefik/yaegi, which provides an interpreter and REPL for Go? It would let you use a performant and well documented language in a more portable scripting way, but not preclude you from generating statically linked binaries if and when that’s convenient.

There’s already some good advice here, especially about virtual environments which might be the most important new concept to learn IMO. But just to let you know - it’s not just you. The most generous view of the Python package situation is that there are a lot of different ways to do it.

a stable experience that isn’t buggy

Stable has a particular meaning with distros but I think the context here is using the plain English definition of the word.

The README lacks a description of why I would choose this over rm. The name makes me think it might replace shred but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

This is probably the worst example to choose, because in the US the generic name is acetaminophen. This is a case where the brand name actually unites understanding of a drug whose chemical name differs by location.

That being said, I still agree with the spirit, let’s stick to referring to the drug and not the brand.

Rust: “Oh honey you aren’t ready to compile that yet”