[chubot]

I agree on both counts. My first experience with shell was the fact that 'foo=bar' works for assignment but 'foo = bar' doesn't. Surely that must be a mistake! Why would anyone design such a silly language?

I got past all of that, and I also see people struggling to accomplish things that can be done in 30 seconds with shell. My main language is Python, and for certain tasks it just can't compete with shell. Believe it or not I think I once wrote a Python script to do what "find | sed -i" does.

Now I'm back in the "who would design such a silly language" mindset, and I am designing and implementing a new shell. You might like some of my blog posts:

"Pipelines Support Vectorized, Point-Free, and Imperative Style"

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/15.html

"Shell Has a Forth-like Quality" http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/13.html (on HN previously)

[jwhite]

Thanks for those links, I think I will enjoy them. I was actually thinking about Forth as well when I was writing those comments about functional programming. I'll be interested to read your take on it.