I've been using the Boldvoice app (no affiliation), it's not perfect but pretty good; my spoken English has definitely improved in a few months. I would recommend it.
> But we should look at what Lua did for Neovim. There has been an explosion of development effort now that Neovim finally added a reasonable programming interface.
It is very much debatable whether Lua is the "reasonable programming interface" causing the activity in Neovim. Vimscript has many flaws, one of them being that it doesn't look like other programming languages, but it does its specialized job pretty well. It is slow, but efforts are made in that area. Lua is well designed but it certainly has its shortcomings too, and many argue (me included) that programming in Lua is not that pleasant. The Lua bindings have been available in Vim for quite some time, but they never were popular, for some reasons.
Anyway, it is not directly related to your point, but I think that example is not that compelling.
> "If you have to write more than 10 lines, then use a real language"
I swear, there should be a HN rule against those. It pollutes every single Shell discussions, bringing nothing to them and making it hard for others do discuss the real topic.
It's a case of knowing the wooledge website (and working with shellcheck), or not. Picking snippets on stackoverflow will probably do more harm than good, tbh.