clerk

Clojure (either native JVM or Babashka) Once you've got a repl up and running the JVM launch time isn't an issue and repl driven development lends itself well to data munging/exploration Clojure's data centricity (functional, everything's a sequence, strong data manipulation std lib) really makes it a dream for these quick and dirty data transformation/exploration jobs If you want to get fancy, https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk (notebook interface) and https://github.com/techascent/tech.ml.dataset (data frame library) will get you there

Clojure's slow, deliberate development pace confuses people. The core team takes backwards compatibility very seriously. What you see with each new Clojure release is generally improved performance, better Java interop, and a smattering of new features. This is doubly true for 1.12 which is doing quite a bit of invisible work to make interop considerably better. So what you don't see is a constant flux of "innovation" followed by a community having to adapt to those innovations. People pull Clojure examples out of books that are 12 or more years old and they still run. I think there's some very exciting things in the Clojure space, such as Clerk (https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk) for live notebooks, and Babashka (https://github.com/borkdude/babashka) for amazing (and amazingly fast) scripting.