The thing is, if you look at what people on various programming language channels mock, bash et al should be the target of widespread derision. It does everything "wrong" and is an absolute mess. Yet all of these languages do a really good job of being super simple to use when you quickly need to automate something, even if the result is an unreadable, unmaintainable mess. It's ease of writing that is being optimized for, not reading/maintenance. But a big chunk of the code I actually write is in the category of write-once, use-once, never-read. (Reorganizing data on disk, doing a one-time data cleanup or reduction, renaming deeply nested files matching certain patterns, tabulating data, etc.)
newLISP, as far as I can tell, is an attempt to apply s-expressions to the same niche, and it makes the same sort of ugly, aesthetically horrifying compromises that shell languages (+ perl) do. But the only questions of import, I think, is: does it work? Is it quick to use? Is it simple, and not mentally taxing to automate something in newLISP?
If so, I'd much rather code in newLISP than write another hideous bash loop.