> I was hoping someone finally had a library or something to make python good at the things shell does well (mostly, running stuff and piping output around). If only.

Good news, they did! Even better news: it doesn't require python, it's cross platform, and supports an easy-to-read verbose style for scripts but a quick-to-write terse style for interactive usage. It's an absolute joy to use for nested data structures, everything is an object and it has full native tab completion.

Unfortunately it came out of Microsoft so a lot of people haven't given it the time of day yet. It's honestly one of the joys of modern CLI usage though.