Shell and bash are actually excellent at this, but people don't like writing shell scripts. This is just process chaining. Take a look at DJB's or the more modern runit for init toolkits that compose.

https://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

http://smarden.org/runit/

Here is a bash function that retries N times:

    retry() {
      local n=$1
      shift
      for i in $(seq $n); do
        "$@"
      done
    }

    retry 5 echo hi
    

Then you can compose with a timeout function, which already exists:

    timeout-demo() {
      timeout 0.1 $0 retry 5 echo hi
    }

You can pass the names of other functions as pre and post hooks as well.

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/time...

Shell has a very forth-like quality to it, and Forth is sort of like a backwards Lisp as well (postfix rather than prefix).