[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm confused. You had a good time with C but trouble with shell? I was strongly under the impression that 90% of Unix shells were strongly inspired by C semantics. Return codes, quoting, strings in general, etc. You maybe could even try csh if that was better.

[jwhite]

Every language has its warts, but C is a pretty small language when it comes down to it. Compare that to just the number of different ways you can expand a parameter in bash:

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Shell-Par...

That's the sort of thing that turned me off. I still tend to avoid those nooks and crannies, although they are sometimes useful. I'm not an expert.

I'm not sure about Unix shells being inspired by C semantics. I actually started out on csh or tcsh, I forget which, two decades ago. I'm not sure that making a shell language "C-like" is a useful goal, and those two shells both fell out of favour because they have many flaws. I switched to bash quite quickly.