In my opinion this is a superficial view of the problem which misses the fundamental point. The Unix shell tries to be 2 things and suffers as a result. It is a

In my opinion this is a superficial view of the problem which misses the fundamental point. The Unix shell tries to be 2 things and suffers as a result. It is a) an interactive shell, optimised for quick navigation and b) a programming api. The programming api should be as simple as possible, but no simpler, everything should be well structured and in long form and with typed arguments. e.g. 'ls' would be 'listDirectory' and it would take arguments as named parameters. It would also be directly bindable into programming languages (rather than messing around with strings to 'execute'. The interactive shell would be a program built on top of the programming api (an api which does everything, not posix), and would contain all the abbreviations and implicit type conversions. This would probably create more choice/fragmentation/innovation than currently exists it would be more practical to deprecate commands and arguments.