Bash/sh/zsh family is brilliant at intense interaction with humans. Aliases, short built-in commands, oneliner-oriented nature, keyboard ergonomics, really concise file/process handling - all of this makes it _the shell_.
I think it's hard for a language to be both suited for interactive and scripting programming, Python/Ruby/Node explicitly are languages for "heavy" scripting, they're poor choices for spending all day long with in a shell. Conciseness and obscurity of bash makes it a poor choice for "heavy" scripting. Also I think that Perl would be a nice shell and maybe that's why it's so often blamed for write-only code.
One attempt which comes close, I think, is Shelly[1]. It's in Haskell and it's definitely not quite right for interactive(!) human interaction, but I'd use it for any remotely non-trivial scripts where quoting might be an issue.
I think it's hard for a language to be both suited for interactive and scripting programming, Python/Ruby/Node explicitly are languages for "heavy" scripting, they're poor choices for spending all day long with in a shell. Conciseness and obscurity of bash makes it a poor choice for "heavy" scripting. Also I think that Perl would be a nice shell and maybe that's why it's so often blamed for write-only code.