I've written a fair number of long bash/zsh scripts for text file manipulation and I loathe to maintain them. They got extra complicated bc they would handle whether you called them directly vs in a subshell, and I always have to refer to a cheatsheet to get the right syntax for anything, since bash is so "powerful" (sensitive to variable expansion or not, etc etc).

I tried Ruby instead and it's nice but not enough of an improvement over bash for me. I tried Julia which has nice support for shell but the JIT compilation was annoying so I dropped it.

Currently I'm trying Nimscript, which is ok but example code is sparse, docs unfriendly, and the language is hostile to tabs and it has noisy output that you have to disable. Overall it's not pretty but workable so far.

Before you downvote me for insulting your fave language, he asked for opinions, and that's what I wrote.