[Argorak]

Shell scripts have a lot of implicit dependencies.

They string together other programs with widely differing interfaces. For example BSD sed and GNU sed work very differently, at least when you accidentally use a non-standard option.

Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Java, C++ all have a stable base vocabulary (core library).

bash doesn't.

[jasim]

Speaking of implicit dependencies, here are a few: env, path, any executable file either in the current directory or in the search path. env = functions and aliases, and can be modified by any shell script. The path is an implicit dependency in the sense any chmod +x files in any of these directories can affect the shell. Which means the shell is also dependent on the file system itself.

[mbrock]

True enough, though as soon as you have dependencies, you can't guarantee cross-platform or cross-version portability with those other languages either.

[Argorak]

They all come with a dependency manager and the problem of sh (or bash? got your bashisms ready all the time?) is that the moment of introducing dependencies is "immediate".