> It seems like such an insane language I wouldn’t say insane, just limited. But the main point of the shell and of scripting the shell is to execute programs

> It seems like such an insane language I wouldn’t say insane, just limited. But the main point of the shell and of scripting the shell is to execute programs and creating pipelines. If you need to do complex things, or you need special data structures or you need to process the output directly yourself in any significant way, then shell scripting is simply not the right tool for the job. And in the case where you want to use another language why do you want to transpile to shell script? Better to just install Python 3 or something on the server. (It might even be installed there by default already.)