I also like Bash - it's a powerful language, especially when combined with a rich ecosystem of external commands that can make your life easier, e.g. GNU Parall

I also like Bash - it's a powerful language, especially when combined with a rich ecosystem of external commands that can make your life easier, e.g. GNU Parallel. Handling binary data can also work in Bash, provided that you just use it as a glue for pipelines between other programs (e.g. feeding video data into ffmpeg). One time, while working on some computer vision project, I had a need to hack up a video-capture-and-upload program for gathering training data during a certain time of day. It took me about 20 minutes and 50 lines of Bash to setup the whole thing, test it, and be sure it works.