Honestly, I've done a lot of professional work in both languages, and there is pretty much nothing you can't do with ruby that you can in python. There is no intrinsic difference in power of expressiveness between the languages. Although ruby is lagging a little behind with the asyncio syntactic sugar stuff. You may reach a point where there simply isn't any client written for the service you are trying to automate in either language. And python got more love in that aspect what with all the being the number one preferred scripting language on planet earth, but in case your target of automation provides a simple rest or websocket protocol you could easily do without a dedicated client library for it.
Oh async/await is just python's and javascript's way of executing functions concurrently within the same process. asyncio emerges as a rewrite of a standard library to support this idiom. Browsers that execute javascript ES6 and node v7 onwards have this feature. Instead of passing callbacks to functions and have them executed concurrently, you create a task or future (in python 3.6+) or a Promise (in javascript) and await that. That is very useful because it untangles the callback-inside-callback structure.
For ruby I found this article which shows the gist of what we are trying to accomplish with async/await (we want to gather a bunch of promises and await all their results and have them run concurrently in an event loop so that when one is waiting for IO to complete, the other one takes over and runs) https://www.codeotaku.com/journal/2018-06/asynchronous-ruby/...
What I'm guessing you're saying is that this kind of behavior is available natively in Python, whereas in Ruby, it is achieved by some roundabout fashion.
Yes, async functions are natively available in python3.6+ and node7+, and requires a gem in ruby. Ruby can also use fibers and eventloop to do concurrency using just the standard library, but it is missing the async/await syntactic sugar.
I think you're both correct. For sysadmin definition of scripting, python would be most popular. For the 'fast to write' definition of scripting then sure, JavaScript.
For the second, the definition of 'scripting language' used to be 'doesn't use a compiler' but JS and everything else has a JIT now, so 'make something quick' is a modern equivalent.
To an extent...
If you're using something that supports promises and not callbacks, which not all of the things you want to use to write an actual script do.
