> I know how and love to write in bash. But oh god was it painful to learn

This is very well said :)

> Sad that there's nothing established to take its place (Perl is read-only, python is not good enough as unix glue, everything else is too obscure).

Is there anything notable? Either particularly well designed, or just popular? I think I've only ever heard of Oil (https://oilshell.org)