Comment by pmarreck

I guess we should distinguish "the shell environment" (which might stay Bash) with "the shell script language" (which could be any one of a number of options, just use the right hashbang header)

One that strove to do both WOULD have to do all the things you suggested as well (job management, stdout/stderr redirection etc.) So options like oil shell, nushell, fish etc.

I was just talking about "a commandline tooling language" in general, as far as use-cases. And for that, Lua (and Moonscript, which compiles to Lua but is way nicer and has been featured on HN a few times over the years) seems to fit the bill (1-based indexing aside, ugh)