Scala is really great for this too. The downside is the spin up time for the JVM, but the upside is that if you use SBT's script launcher it will compile and ca

Scala is really great for this too. The downside is the spin up time for the JVM, but the upside is that if you use SBT's script launcher it will compile and cache the script transparently for you , you can still pull in _any_ JVM dependency and you can run it just like a shell script. I needed to test for a port being open in parallel and it was a cake walk to use NIO's SocketSelector to do it reactivly.