This is quite apropos, as just last week I released a little language called 'bish' designed to overcome exactly this issue. It compiles to bash for portability, but has more modern and familiar syntax.

See https://github.com/tdenniston/bish for the repo and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166386 for some previous discussion.

The language is still brand new and under active development. It's not stable yet.