[ilyash]

> The strongly-typed Python-lite described in the linked man pages

It's not strongly typed and types annotations can be left out in many places:

mylist.map(F(elt) "my $elt")

elt type is not specified.

The command syntax $(...) will cover some of the simple scripting needs. Please provide specific code examples (probably in bash) that you think will look bad.

> `jq` is an amazing

It is but in my opinion much less convenient than built-in support for data structures.