BTW, Rakudo (Perl 6) might be a good candidate for the language of imperative builders (in place where we use bash on Linux).
It is:
- more expressive than Bash (and Perl 5)
- has a lot of features from Haskell to make FP people happy
- has excellent Unicode support
- and (what is rare among scripting languages, because most of them were quickly ported from Unix land) it works well with Windows paths, including symlinks