I've never done any serious programming with bash, just simple Bourne shell scripts, because I don't want to think about all the escaping rules and such. I did write some programs in Awk in the 90s (notably https://github.com/darius/awklisp), so I'd go with that. Maybe someone who's bent bash to their will could speak up here?

AFAIK they're both ubiquitous, though you might need a particular awk like gawk for library functions, depending on what you need to do. Nowadays I'm way more likely to use Python, though of course it's a much bigger dependency.

Sorry about the injury, and good luck -- I'd like to hear how it goes.