Stacksmith has headaches with bash:
It seems completely nuts, acting completely different if you change a whitespace.
gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-08-01.bash.gmi
Your post made me smile!
I will admit that bash syntax has a lot of baggage from days long past, however, I am living in shells (sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, pdksh, bash) since like 1990 pretty much every day. I use bash as a glue language, because it is always there. I have tried zsh about 20 minutes, but it got in my way fast. I will say that a command shell without pipelines is useless in my not so humble opinion. But I do still learn. A thing I added only recently ist the use of __git_ps1 in my shell prompt.
PS1='\u@\h:\w$(__git_ps1)\n\$ '
To me python and C++ look completely incomprehensible. I learned perl4 and perl5 and C way back. I also learned some Forth, where the only syntax is this:
Tokens (called words) are separated by one or more spaces.
That's it. And yes ':' and ';' or '+' are valid tokens calling their associated code.
So to me it is just the other way round. In shell scripts I can spot a spurious space or quote quite fast. And since I can rely on bash being installed everywhere I have to work, I do use bashisms like associative arrays (think hash tables) and a lot of the ${var#/%}-edit something modifiers, or <(process substitution) and the like. By the way: I keep shellcheck running via flycheck in my emacs buffers, but it cannot always get "it" right :) I recently came across a line, where shellcheck demanded quotes, that would brake the script. The details are not important, but yes, these cases exist.
Stacksmith:
I wish there was a compact Common Lisp shell.
Not all hope is lost: scheme shell good enough?
https://www.linux.com/news/scripting-scheme-shell/
Happy hacking!