I remember seeing shell for the first time ~15 years ago, and it certainly looked like an arcane ritual. Syntax like var=value and [ x -eq y ] was super weird

I remember seeing shell for the first time ~15 years ago, and it certainly looked like an arcane ritual. Syntax like var=value and [ x -eq y ] was super weird coming from C and Python. My Oil project fixes many of these problems: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht... (as well as fixing semantic problems; it's not just syntax)