For me the reason for pursuing scripting languages over sh is because of multi-platform projects that I've had to support in the past where every little shell n

For me the reason for pursuing scripting languages over sh is because of multi-platform projects that I've had to support in the past where every little shell nuance, every tool nuance has introduced bugs in one platform or the other. It's too easy to create problems and too time consuming to find them. You need special resources to test/debug and so on. The installer and the build system were the areas that caused the most pain - e.g. trying to debug build errors because some system has a slightly different version of some tool like sed..... I felt that including a portable language in the installer would mostly eliminate this problem since one could eliminate the use of these hard-to-standardise tools. I don't care about POSIX standard command-line tools - IMO they are an example of how to encourage the proliferation of variants by blocking progress. Some installers include Java which is a nightmare - big and not helpful. IIRC InstallJammer included TCL which was not bad. I think GNU make (even though it is old school it's very commonly used) needs a shell that can work on windows AND UNIX operating systems equally and is fast to load up (i.e. not cygwin). The problem with e.g. using python as the make shell is that it has a bigger startup time than e.g. bash which is ok for most usecases but does matter in a build. So I sort of like the idea of hush but I need to find out how portable it is and what's the startup time.