bourne shell scripting is good enough, which makes it nearly impossible to replace. Plan9's rc is a bit cleaner, and no one is going to switch for 'more of the

bourne shell scripting is good enough, which makes it nearly impossible to replace. Plan9's rc is a bit cleaner, and no one is going to switch for 'more of the same, but cleaner'. You haven't switched to something similar but better even though you could literally do it right now https://pkgsrc.se/shells https://pkgsrc.se/shells , and it doesn't run any different for anyone else. It usually takes something several times better in some crucial aspect to replace an entrenched technology. For example, Plan 9 is better than UNIX-like systems, but not good enough to replace them. I don't think it's possible to make something good enough to replace bourne shell scripting in its niche because before you have something several times better, good enough to actually replace it, you're in a different ecological niche or problem domain, for real scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. It's a local maximum solution that sucks the air out of the room for potential competition closer to the theoretical global maximum solution for the narrow problem domain.