These are fair points. POSIX shell being fixed forever though also means it will /never/ get "fixed". Shell's silent-failure-by-default, implicit-by-default,

These are fair points. POSIX shell being fixed forever though also means it will /never/ get "fixed". Shell's silent-failure-by-default, implicit-by-default, principle-of-most-surprise semantics will always be there, and they are /bad/. I have read lots of shell scripts, by many people, from the experienced UNIX greybeard to to the novice web developer, and they were almost all flawed. Pointing out the flaws, the devlopers of each level were surprised by them. It is close to impossible to write correct shell script, no matter the level of expertise, because the language offers neither semantics nor tooling that foster correctness. Forgetting `set -e`, forgetting that it gets turned back off in subshells, quoting mistakes, pipefail semantics, you have to have made many mistakes to even /discover/ that these pitfalls exist (or use shellcheck, which will find some, but certainly not all of them). Shell is a language that looks simple on the surface, but has 1000s of exceptions you have to master to write even minimal non-bugged scripts. The lack of any form of reasonable data structures and strings being the prevalent data types also do not help. For example, NixOS's linker wrapper script (written in bash) was accidentally quadratic because of quadratic append-to-strings (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/27609); https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/27609); and that was despite NixOS having many competent bash programmers. When scripts grow, these things happen.(Note that shellcheck does /not/ point out quadratic string appends; it can only find obvious mistakes and this is hard to detect in general). Fixing it was very difficult, and was not understood by many. If you have a language like Python that offers reasonable set/dict data structures that people understand and use intuitively, this is trivially avoided. Finally, POSIX does not help much when the main thing shell does is calling other programs, and there are no guarantees on what the APIs for those programs are. For example, I have encountered many shell scripts that themselves are technically "portable", but they use arguments to e.g. `rm` that do not work on e.g. busybox, thus crashing the boot processe and resulting in hours of time lost for hundreds of people. By not using shell, we can support that the next SOMETHING-standard will NOT mandate shell, but something better.