This is mostly true, and it doesn't look like this is the solution. My belief is any solution needs to be built from the ground up as a language for shell use,

This is mostly true, and it doesn't look like this is the solution. My belief is any solution needs to be built from the ground up as a language for shell use, not adapting Python/Scala/Haskell to shell use. However, there is some non-zero amount of verbosity that would be worth trading for better control flow, composability, data structures, etc. As long as you can do simple operations and pipes with the same syntax | grep foo cp * path/ rm -rf it's ok if some operations are more verbose in exchange for that. Programmers don't live in bash, and deal with the pain points of switching between bash and an actual programming language on a regular basis. I know I'm there. A change that sometimes is more verbose but lets you do more things in shell would still have benefits. You might not win over the people who are bash experts, but you could still produce a better tool for many people.