> Honestly, though? The right answer is to transpile a better language to Sh.

I like this, but I think it's even better to just escape sh entirely. If you are on a system that supports sh, it almost certainly has a c99 compatible compiler which can be used to install lua(JIT)? or another better scripting language. I wrote a little script idempotently installs lua 5.4 (that I tried to include but HN formatting messed up) and then runs a luascript embedded in a heredoc. The first time I ran it, it took 5.4 seconds to print "Hello, world!" including downloading the lua source code from their website and compiling the whole thing. The second time it took 11ms. I really see no great reason to continue using sh for anything new except for the purpose of installing something else.