Agreed. I'm kind of amazed that nothing dramatically better than Bash has come along on *nix (sure Zsh is better but only incrementally so). It seem like we could create a command line oriented programming language that would be miles ahead of Bash by incorporating the last 25 years of language design. I would love a shell with the following:

- Real functions instead of having to use 'echo' to return values

- Parsing script params also defines autocompletion (think completion parser combinators such as those found in SBT (Simple Build Tool))

- Support for FRP (funtional reactive programming) would make interacting with streams and sockets much easier

- Support for JSON streams as well as plain text

Maybe one day I will finally get the time to write such a shell.