Definitely take a look at Go. If criticism on HN is what you're concerned about, I can tell you that when I started writing Go ~3 years ago it got a lot more criticism on HN than it does now. I've used it as my primary language since then and it's a fun language.
I second taking a look at Go, but be aware that for replacing shell scripts Go has one big disadvantage: binaries tend to get rather large, because all libraries are statically linked.
I have one script that writes postgres, does a HTTP request and needs to read file. 100 locs resulted in 7.2M binary size.
