OT: any recommendation for scripting language

I'm a bit new with python, but have found it extremely easy to learn and
use. I have been using it to pre-process some text files that we often
deal with and need to be formatted in a certain way before they can be
used for statistical analysis in another software program.

I suppose there is one thing I've learned that can make python a bit
more useful than R. It is possible to use Freeze to make your python
programs stand alone executables. So, if you have any need to have a
non-programmer replicate something easily, you can write a python
program and even make a GUI with Tkinter that will work on any platform
(as I understand it). 

Just the other day, a colleague and I wrote programs to process a text
file. His was SAS and mine was python and both gave the same end result.
My python code was about 4 lines long whereas his SAS code was
ridiculously long and hard to understand. We settled a bet than python
is better for this kind of stuff.