I call this to drop into an immediate repl at the point of invocation in a language that doesn't hate me (Ruby):

     require 'pry'; binding.pry

This is, in fact, 2017. One might call it the current year. The stone knives and bearskins of shell scripting have not kept apace with, like...anything else in our industry. You might be comfortable with them, but that doesn't make it easy, it means you have frayed countless synapses learning it.