The question you should ask yourself is not what use instead of bash but what is the problem you are trying to solve and what is the best way to solve it. It's

The question you should ask yourself is not what use instead of bash but what is the problem you are trying to solve and what is the best way to solve it. It's hard for us to help you with you giving us some context. 150-500 loc of bash are not that much, specially when you combine bash with standard Unix utilities. These scripts you wrote, for what do you use them? Are they executed by humans or machines? On which platform? Linux, Mac, Windows or all? You mentioned jq. Are you parsing json from HTTP requests or files? And why are you parsing json with bash? Without a better context, A lot of people will say to use Python and Python is a good choice with you are running you scripts on Linux because you probably already have Python 3 installed and whatever you are writing with 500 loc of bash can be accomplished with zero dependencies with Python standard library. If relying on the Python runtime is really a problem for you, your next best option is Go. Go is easy to learn and easy to use for building small cli apps with only the standard library, but even if you need some dependency, you will ship a single binary, so no problems with runtime compatibility or dependencies.