The niche for such a language would be extremely narrow compared to existing better-than-shell-script alternatives. Wasn't that perl's selling point? Compiling

The niche for such a language would be extremely narrow compared to existing better-than-shell-script alternatives. Wasn't that perl's selling point? Compiling to bash doesn't seem like that much of a better option than shipping (or just requiring implicitly) a $BETTER_LANGUAGE runtime, and writing in that language. (I imagine someone might respond with some carefully constructed scenario where you can only use a shell script, but I'd expect that sort of scenario to be rare.) My go-to is either Python or Ruby when shell scripts start to get unwieldy - lately it's been Ruby but I'm mentioning Python because I have experience with the type-checking options for Python, and you mentioned that as a benefit. I'm sure someone will point out that type-checking exists for Ruby too (Sorbet, others?); I've just never tried it.