A while ago I wrote a tiny language (called bish) that was an attempt at finding a middle ground for this problem. Essentially, you write your shell scripts in

A while ago I wrote a tiny language (called bish) that was an attempt at finding a middle ground for this problem. Essentially, you write your shell scripts in bish, with sane syntax and semantics (example: function return values, which are not really present in bash). The bish compiler then compiles your script to bash. I haven't touched it in a few years now, but maybe it's of interest to someone: https://github.com/tdenniston/bish https://github.com/tdenniston/bish