Being such a concise language, Haskell could be a good option here. You can do quick scripting while still having a powerful type system (especially compared to

Being such a concise language, Haskell could be a good option here. You can do quick scripting while still having a powerful type system (especially compared to Go's) backing you up. I somewhat quickly typed this code up and haven't tested it, but it should replicate that bash script pretty closely: #!/usr/bin/env stack -- stack script --resolver=lts-12.2 import System.Process (system) import Control.Lens import Crypto.Hash.SHA256 import qualified Data.Bytestring.Lazy as B import Network.Wreq url = "https://example.com" mem = "memory.txt" main = do oldsum <- B.readFile mem newsum <- (hashLazy . view responseBody) <$> get url when (oldsum /== newsum) $ do exitCode <- system $ "xmpp_notify " ++ url ++ " changed" B.writeFile mem newsum I didn't make use of it, but there's also the Turtle library which aims to provide a fairly solid shell scripting experience, providing a lot of coreutils as simple Haskell functions. You also get a REPL in the form of GHCI, which comes default in Haskell installations.