ksh93 has "compound variables" that let you have arbitrarily deep trees of data. The syntax for that is ugly. It's hard to use. And I've never had luck with

ksh93 has "compound variables" that let you have arbitrarily deep trees of data. The syntax for that is ugly. It's hard to use. And I've never had luck with not causing ksh93 to crash when trying to use compound variables. I think it'd be very nice to have a bash-like shell with a) jq-like JSON values in the shell (really, parsed, jv-like[0]), b) syntax for using jq programs in ${...}, something like ${var@jq:.jq.program.here}. As for jq having pipes, they're a rather different beast, but I take your point. [0] `jv` is the internal representation of JSON values in jq.