This post implies the decision is between nushell, MS Powershell or something based on shells from the 70s. But there are a plethora of other shells like nushell, that have been around for longer than nushell.

It’s actually a pretty crowded market space.

So why are people still using bash? In part because it’s a default (defaults are hard to change) and in part because it’s largely “good enough”.

It’s the same reason JavaScript is everywhere. First because it was the default in browsers and then because it was good enough that people didn’t want the effort of having to learn nor use another language.

Like what? I’d love a stable nushell alternative.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

In fact I’ve started using some of those older scripts as part of the automated test suits to check against accidental breaking changes.