I cherry-picked the good parts because that's what it was built for. Obviously, misusing it is going to give you a terrible experience, you never answered my q

I cherry-picked the good parts because that's what it was built for. Obviously, misusing it is going to give you a terrible experience, you never answered my question about using another programming language in place of an interactive shell. Ruby, Python and Perl have even stranger variable behavior (esp. re: scope) and their own mess of ugly sigils (all with entirely different semantics), so I don't know why you're picking on sh variables. True, each different shell has its own intricacies (particularly when you get to arrays), but this matters next to never, when you look across uses of the shell.