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Beautiful response to a recurrent misunderstanding.

"Shell languages are defined by their terseness."

It is common to see people put a layer of verbosity on top of the Bourne shell (or system(3)) to make "a new shell".

It is also very common to see people put a layer of abstraction on top of a large, verbose scripting language and claim the result to be a new, "terse" language (with all the power of the shell).

But what I like about the Bourne shell is that it is built from only C. And it does not add too much verbosity. It is, as you say, defined by its terseness.

There is also terseness in the roff-like typesetting languages, assembly languages, FORTH, k/q, etc.

Compared to k/q, sh is verbose.

For me, verbosity means loss of power and loss of time.

I am glad there are terse languages.

They may never again be popular but I think they will always exist.

"The worst parts of the shell are the flow control structures..."

For some reason I dislike if/then/else. Instead I make heavy use return values, ||, test(1) and case/esac.

I always wished Bourne's shell (cf. Joy's C shell) made use of more C operators. There's a file called arith_lex.l in the Almquist sh source but these operators are not used in the sh language.

I would switch to the Plan 9 shell but Bourne sh remains more useful due to its ubiquity.