Give up? Seriously. I used to force myself to do all of my ad-hoc scripting in bash, but I got sick of the clunky way of parsing arguments, dealing with arrays

Give up? Seriously. I used to force myself to do all of my ad-hoc scripting in bash, but I got sick of the clunky way of parsing arguments, dealing with arrays, looping over data objects, etc. I got pretty good at it, but at some point I decided just to stick to a language I knew well (R) to string together various pipelines and construct commands. Any high-level language would work, though. I'm much more productive now.