I wrote another comment here about a strategy for writing portable Bash scripts without compromising on features and freely using arbitrary external commands. I wanted to give an example from the article of how I'd likely write one of his examples of a "somewhat unreadable shell script" in this style.

His ugly sh example:

  morning_greetings=('hi' 'hello' 'good morning')
  energetic_morning_greetings=()

  for s in "${morning_greetings[@]}"; do
    energetic_morning_greetings+=( "${s^^}!" )
  done

and his more readable Python equivalent:

  morning_greetings = ['hi', 'hello', 'good morning']
  energetic_morning_greetings = \
     [s.upper() + '!' for s in morning_greetings]

And I'd write the shell version in Bash something like this:

  morning_greetings=(hi hello 'good morning')
  printf '%s!\n' "${morning_greetings[@]}" \
    | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' \
    | readarray -t energetic_morning_greetings

Does it still involve more syntax? Yeah. Printing arrays in Bash always involves some. But it's clearer at a glance what it does, and it doesn't involve mutating variables.

The piece this example is too simple to show (since it's focused only on data operations and not interacting with the filesystem or running external programs) is how much shorter the Bash usually ends up being than the Python equivalent.