I'm interested in and excited about oil, but three things have stopped me every time I've tried to give it a go.
1. The complete and utter lack of useful documentation. There's not even a link to any docs from the main page of the shell's site. You have to get to the docs from the release page, [1] but I had to find this out by Googling. Given the number of blog-post-like entries in the docs, seems like it would have been less effort and more effective just to write standardized and complete documentation from the start.
Just as an example: can anyone tell me what built-ins Oil has, how to use them, and where they are documented? I'll give you a hint. I found out from one of the blog posts that oil has "min" and "max" commands. The following is valid Oil code:
const x = min(1, 2)
2. It's still pretty buggy and lots of features are missing. Development has seemingly moved slowly over the last several years. If it ever did get to the point where I could make it a daily driver then I'd be willing to track down and report bugs, of course.
3. I'm a little concerned by how much emphasis is put on POSIX / Bash compatibility. Unless there's going to be a way to fully disable what Oil considers "legacy" language support in a script, then that is going to leave a ton of footguns for people who want to write "modern" Oil code. It's not clear to me whether that's the plan or not (I haven't read every one of the blog posts), but it seems like a mistake to me to sacrifice possible syntax improvements on the altar of compatibility.
To be clear, I realize this is basically someone's solo project, and I am impressed by how far it's been taken, just clarifying why I don't think it's ready for general use yet.
(author here) I don't think anything you wrote should be a surprise to regular readers of the blog. Many of my blog posts in the last year say "the scope of the project is too large" and similar stuff.
http://www.oilshell.org/why.html#why-not-use-it
It might be a surprise if you're only reading what shows up on news aggregators. But to be clear, I basically write about what I'm thinking, what progress has been made, etc. And I do "documentation-driven development", which is IMO the best way to design a consistent and coherent language.
The main purpose is to get people to test out the shell, and attract developers who want to push in the same direction. I like this way of working, as I've gotten a lot of valuable feedback and contributions on both OSH and Oil. And I can use more.
Oil is NOT a "product" which you can download and use. (It doesn't even have a logo, partly for that reason.) Right now it's better for say people who have the desire and ability to make it through the quick start for contributing:
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Contributing (how to get a working bin/osh from git in 30 seconds on most Linux distros. You can then hack on it in pure Python and it will be fast)
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The "summer blog backlog" has some project status updates that aren't out yet, but I'll give the tl;dr version here.
There are roughly 5 equal sized parts of project, all large:
1. The compatible OSH language (mature, NOT buggy, but not fast yet)
2. The Oil language (this is 2 years old; there are bugs due to the way we reuse CPython)
3. The interactive shell (punting this to "headless shell")
4. Semi-automatic translation of the "executable spec" from Python to C++
5. Documentation
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/10/osh-features.html
So that was one way of cutting scope. But basically I changed my mind based on prior successes. So I worked on the Oil language a lot this year, and I'm pleased with how its coming together. (The summer blog backlog has sketches of new features. Big things left: the "missing declarative part" of shell for configuration/not-YAML; functions/coprocesses as opposed to shell-like procs)
I made a big list of alternative shells, and none of them is what I want, or what I think the open source ecosystem needs:
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells
This is a very long argument and has to do with the "Perlis-Thompson Principle" and "narrow waists", which I'm about 25% through explaining on the blog.
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So the other way of cutting scope is punting the interactive shell into another process, with Oil being a "headless shell":
See these two comments for details:
https://lobste.rs/s/xestey/opinionated_guide_xargs#c_cn4r2i
https://lobste.rs/s/sdum3p/if_you_could_rewrite_anything_fro... (yes I need to make blog posts out of these)
To clearly repeat what's in those posts: you won't get more than a basic interactive shell based on Oil unless someone else makes big effort. Join #shell-gui on Oil's Zulip, etc.
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So the project is now focused on #1 #2 and #5: OSH and Oil and documentation. The translation to C++ passes about half the tests, but it has stalled. So I have to come up with some way of getting that done too, and it might involve soliciting donations to hire someone, some kind of two-sided market etc.
But right now I'm just concentrating on the Oil language design and explaining it. So you might see many more compelling posts about things you won't be able to immediately use. That is on purpose!
It all absolutely works -- download it now and try it -- but there is a gap to bridge to make it production quality, which involves documentation and translation to C++.
(This post is from a year ago but may give some color on these issues: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/08/risks.html)
In addition to direct collaboration, I also encourage parallel efforts. Someone started porting Oil to Nim, and another person wanted to rewrite Oil only (not OSH) in Rust, etc. I encourage all those efforts.
The project is long, but the "hard part" OSH is quite mature (you should test it), and the "exciting part" Oil is less than 2 years old. And five years ago people said it was impossible to evolve bash into a good language. Now people seem to be taking it for granted that it should exist :)
Something I've been trying to figure out: what is the exact relationship at present between OSH and Oil? When you say "OSH" do you mean the language, or the shell itself "oil shell"? If Oil is not something I can download, why exactly does that `const v = max(1, 2)` statement work in osh? It's clearly not just a Bash implementation, it's got other features. Is that a subset of Oil's features? Which subset?
Since you're also interested in other shells, you might have a look at pyp [1]. It captures a lot of the way I personally would like to use some future shell. If the features of pyp were integrated into the shell itself, you wouldn't need an external command, you could just (for example) pipe the output of one program into a python-like statement that mangles the incoming strings in some way, and pipe that out to some xargs-like program to use in a subshell. (The fact that you apparently can't use the pipe in what Xonsh calls "Python mode" is for me the central limiting feature of that shell.)