[willghatch]

Some other interesting projects around the strict posix shell are Morbig[1], a more trustworthy static parser for the posix shell, and the work of Michael Greenberg[2], who is trying to formalize the semantics of the posix shell.

[1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01890044 [2] http://www.cs.pomona.edu/~michael/

But my personal takeaway from this sort of research is that the posix shell is a truly insane language beyond even its readily apparent shortcomings. It's worthwhile to figure out the exact semantics of a language with so much existing code and have a precise interpreter for it, but frankly I think the more important task is to move away from such terrible languages. Bourne-derived shells have some great ideas, but these could be formalized into more sensible languages. In particular, I think the best direction is to embed shell languages inside good general-purpose languages. I'm biased to that end since I've written a shell embedded in Racket. But there is no shortage of better shell languages that benefit from better language design, such as Powershell and Elvish.

[chubot]

I agree that not just bash, but POSIX shell is beyond salvaging, at least for many use cases where it should be applied.

The way I think of it is that I can't tell my (former) coworkers or my sister to learn to program shell in 2018 "with a straight face". More than 50% of them had Ph.D.'s in some other field like statistics, math, biology, or physics -- i.e. the kind of person who has no problem with Python. But they would struggle with shell or make.

They're the kind of people Mike Bostock (author of d3) wrote this post about Make for [1]. He's absolutely right that they should use Make, because like shell it's a great tool to combine different programs that weren't designed to be combined.

But I feel like this is basically a losing battle -- I don't see that shell or make is an exciting thing for most people to learn, even though it would make them more productive and increase the quality of their work. I think that a language free of legacy would go a long way.

I guess I can see POSIX sh being used when confined to the lower level of an OS, by specialists. But I think it has a lot more potential than that. I'd say it's more important now than 10 years ago, because there's so much more software out there and systems are increasingly built of large heterogeneous parts.

----

FWIW I mentioned Morbig here [2], along with several other shell parsers, like ShellCheck in Haskell and shfmt in Go.

[1] https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/

[2] https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources

[Sir_Cmpwn]

I don't see sh as a losing battle. I actually think it's quite good for the niche it aims to serve - a niche that very much exists, sh is a square peg and should only go in square holes. I think most folks have had their impression of POSIX shell tainted by bad shells like bash and - sorry - oil encouraging complex, non-portable shell scripts. I intend to write more blog posts in the future helping people gain a closer understanding of POSIX shell and how/where it's useful and how to use it.