For those unfamiliar with Common Lisp there is also Babashka which allows for Clojure shell scripting without the JVM startup time.
Like, I didn't even consider including "some ugly reader macros" to handle the shebang issue, since my approach has been to comment it out while developing and uncomment once I was ready to use it as a script. But I think this simple macro I put just now in my $HOME/.sbclrc file should suffice:
(set-dispatch-macro-character #\# #\! (lambda (stream subchar arg)
(declare (ignore subchar arg))
(read-line stream nil (values) t)
(values)))
> Life's too short to remember how to write Bash code.
Hard agree.
I used to think that there was "something wrong" with me for finding C++ verbose and C expressively dangerous, or to find myself reaching for multi-line awk, sed, and bash scripts that did _stupid_ things when I "knew" that a better solution existed but I didn't know how to _express_ that solution concisely.
Perhaps a more concrete example would be this: I don't use python often and some of its syntactical quirks get me every time -- like, for example, None as a method to insert a new axis by convention in numpy (so much so that numpy define np.newaxis as an alias to it). It makes total sense but at the same time, the fact that the language likes having what almost looks like a C NULL as a method to insert a dimension seems...wrong, like it should be a syntax error.
I've now just come to realise that hey: if you can't express this concept well in one language, and you _can_ in another, it's well worth prototyping the solution in the right domain and one could always write something in a "sensible" language later if it turns out to work.
The only way I found to learn it that was fun was too write a shell implementation myself. Just POSIX, though so I never learned ksh/bash features.