That's basically what Oil's approach is. Oil is POSIX and bash compatible, but it also has Python-like data structures (recursive dicts, lists). And there's a

That's basically what Oil's approach is. Oil is POSIX and bash compatible, but it also has Python-like data structures (recursive dicts, lists). And there's also room to add select/filter/sort. We need help :) https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil