I really like bash when dealing with even somewhat advanced scripting. Like the 300 LOC scraper I have written over the past two days which horribly parses HTML files using grep | sed.

It's genuinely so much more fun to do this with Bash than, say, Python. I have once written a scraper using Beautifulsoup and I have no desire to do so ever again.

Honestly, only Haskell manages to beat Bash in how satisfying it feels when you manage to get something working well.

You're not forced into global forced variables, but they're the default. Use the local keyword in front of the variable declaration for nicely scoped variable.

It's not that cumbersome to do things like

local date=`date`
echo "$date"

but in all honesty the syntax sucks ass because it's not intuitive. If statements suck ass, passing variables has to be done via command line arguments sucks ass, switch statements suck ass, making structured data sucks ass (jq is nice though).

I agree with you that bash really sucks when you get to anything more than 10 lines and at that point I'd take literally prefer Dreamberd.

Functions are definitely not subshells in Bash, seeing as anything modifying the environment, like pyenv and such, is implemented as functions instead of scripts — specifically because functions are run in the same shell instance.

Unless 'subshell' means something in the vein of 'like a new shell, but not really'.

where in your pipe you got a non-null exit code

First thing you want is set -e and set -o pipefail. That should report the errors in human-parseable form.

Second, to capture exit codes from each command/program, you have to run each of them in sequence yourself, connected by pipes that you create via mkfifo — the same way as you would do it in any other programming environment. Bash's | pipes are just a convenient shorthand for this,so if you want full control, you have to ditch the convenience.