sh vs J

It may not be the best if you want power, but if you want to write a POSIX script that will run everywhere, it's a pretty good choice.

Bourne shell introduced features such as piping, here documents, command substitution, variables, control structures for condition-testing and looping and filename wildcarding.

3 classes of operators (verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions) with verbs the most basic function that take either 1 or 2 (infix) parameters. Operators allow function composition with a minimum of parentheses.

J also supports multiline functional definitions similar to BASIC/Pascal. Including error handling.

Each built in operator is a C/asm function, and special code further optimizes some operator combinations. Result is optimized C speed from quick parsing. Array orientation parses and compiles a function once, and applies it to all array items.

Still actively developed, but most recent changes have been in libraries and IDE and platform support.
Language is considered "perfected"... though not quite.

Complete core programming functional tools allow writting programs and libraries without imports.

(... within each of the 3 operator classes) makes reading code easier. Very simple parsing rules.