> I agree that the Bourne Shell in particular is a pretty suboptimal language, and I think we can probably do a lot better. [...] But it's easy to do worse. I

> I agree that the Bourne Shell in particular is a pretty suboptimal language, and I think we can probably do a lot better. [...] But it's easy to do worse. I found this startlingly true when having to write nontrivial scripts using the classic Windows cmd.exe language (what's its actual name? Batch?). Bourne Shell's feature set, archaic as it is, is so much more conceptually unified. Exactly as you say, it's sobering to keep in mind that things can be a LOT worse.