It has idiosyncracies because it's not a general purpose language. Even the things that she mentions are happening for good reasons - like the fact that set -x

It has idiosyncracies because it's not a general purpose language. Even the things that she mentions are happening for good reasons - like the fact that set -x would break the expected behavior of || and &&. Actually what language does crash when a function returns false? I mean some throw exceptions but isn't "false" a valid thing to return? I find the same thing with makefiles - people don't understand what they're doing and expect them to work in a certain way because they haven't ever thought about build systems very deeply. Recursive assignment in Make catches almost everyone out e.g. FLAGS=-b COMPILE=compile $(FLAGS) $(info compile command=$(COMPILE)) FLAGS=-a myfile: echo $(COMPILE) $? -o $@ outputs: t43562@rhodes:~ make -f t.mk compile command=compile -b echo compile -a -o myfile compile -a -o myfile Despite this, making all assignments immediate to match other programming languages would take a VERY useful tool away. The more you understand these tools the more you know where to bother using them and how much effort to put into it.