> Uses a package manager written in less than 1000 lines of POSIX sh (excluding blank lines and comments).

Enough to get 20 bugs :-). I wish there was a good standard alternative to bash (sh in this case) for shell programming.

Otherwise I like the spirit, it's a good match with collapse os ;-)

Could you explain more re: bugs? Dylan Araps sort of specialises in well-written (ba)sh and iirc uses shellcheck meticulously. I ask not to be combative in case you're just making a casual joke - more I'd like understand how bugs might creep in to (ba)sh code - even if say, one follows shellcheck and is as competent as Dylan.

I saw that after posting. It's not a critic of Dylan's work, more a critic of how difficult it is to write good bash code. Your comment on shellcheck and Dylan expertise just confirm it. It's like C, you could write safe C but it's very difficult.

I wish there was a language with the ubiquity of Bash but modern and safe.

»I wish there was a language with the ubiquity of Bash but modern and safe«

I agree. But reaching such a point would be hard. Not impossible, but hard.

I think the main problem would be to gain traction for an alternative. Because if one questions the status quo, then there are tons of alternative paths to go by. But which of them are viable…? It’s not easy to pick a winner in this kind of situtation. And most people, even in tech, would not want to spend hours on trying out/developing a new shell that won’t gain any significant traction.

The Bourne shell was developed in the mid 70s. There were not many other scripting languages around then, so Bourne shell became a major player. They could probably have used Lisp if they wanted to, but AFAIK Lisp was not widespread within the Unix world back then.

These days we have many other models for interpreted languages. Ruby, Python, Perl, TCL, Scheme, Clojure, etc etc.

Let’s say someone wrote a Python-inspired shell that aimed to replace sh/Bash. Now you need to gain traction in order to build up a useful and sound ecosystem that has the ability to replace all those shell scripts out there. But how would you convince the Ruby fans or Scheme fans to use that? Therein lies a big challenge.

Getting people to continue using sh is not as hard, since it at least is standard, despite its shortcomings.

[Slightly edited.]

https://github.com/oilshell/oil

A new Unix shell. Our upgrade path from bash to a better language.

It runs thousands of lines of existing shell scripts unmodified, but there's also a brand new language that will be familiar to Python or JS programmers. See http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht...

It works and you can try it now. The downside is that the implementation is more like a slow prototype, but that's being addressed, and the release I made today has stats about the C++ version (blog post forthcoming).