alt Hacker News> You mean that the user should locally configure the machine to ensure that the standardized name points at something that can solve the problem, and then accepts the quirks of that choice, yes?
I was thinking that until I read the forum thread and Stephen Rosen's comments. Now I'm thinking the most useful meta-runner would just try popular runners in order.
I have put up a prototype at https://github.com/dbohdan/python-script-runner.
Neat. Of course it doesn't have much value unless it's accepted as a standard and ships with Python ;) But I agree with your reasoning. Might be worth reviving that thread to talk about it.