I see a lot of discussion on the awkwardness and idiosyncrasies of shells like bash.... So this is a great time for a shameless plug! Last week I released a language called 'bish' (https://github.com/tdenniston/bish) which compiles to bash, but has none of the same syntactical weirdness. So the idea is: write and maintain your script in bish, but compile to bash and ship the bash version.
Here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166386) is the previous discussion from last week.