it's definitely a hot take, you could theoretically use any other language as a shell, and i know you sort of can with stuff like node as well.

But those aren't shell languages, and bash isn't a true language, in the sense that it was explicitly designed to be used in the shell environment, i also consider it to be "pseudocode" because it's not actually bash doing things a pretty significant amount of time you'll stuff something into sed or awk, which are actually different interpreters all together.

bash is almost a sort of wrapper, between a bunch of different programs that all handle things differently, allowing you to glue them back together to make something usable. It's close enough to being it's own language, that you could make it one, but it's not, because it's not supposed to be one.

i suppose that's pretty much what i mean when i say constricted.