Bash

Bashblog generates a full static blog, RSS, tags and backups from one ~1,200-line Bash script that leans only on standard Unix tools. No runtime to install, no database. It has 1.9k GitHub stars.

The objection was blunt: one engineer said there's zero advantage to bash past a few lines, with editor syntax highlighting breaking across the file. The counter came from someone who runs web servers in 128MB of RAM, where pulling in Python or Node is exactly the cost you're trying to avoid.

The trick is three lines: open file descriptor 3 on /dev/tcp, printf a raw GET with CRLF headers, then cat the descriptor back. The Connection: close header is load-bearing — drop it and cat waits forever.

But the loudest reply in the thread was a correction: Bash does not speak HTTP. It opens a socket and you speak HTTP, badly. The toy client doesn't parse responses and breaks on redirects, chunking, or TLS.