“I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl”[1] (last posted here[2] in 2020) also makes some good points that are not in other writeups, specifially regarding interactive use.
I think Tcl(’s standard library) is still too wordy to make a comfortable interactive shell, but it’s still leagues above everything else I’ve seen; in particular, I can’t help but think Shivers’s dismissal of interactive use in his description of Scsh is something of a cop-out—there are (now, maybe not then) plenty of nice languages to hack a prototype or a quick script in, but somehow Bourne shell + Unix utilities is still the best we can do that won’t make my fingers ache? Tcl demonstrates very well that inside sh there’s a Lisp trying to get out (and Plan 9’s rc does the same but worse), but somehow that line of thought seems to not have been continued further.
(Just in case, I see both Elvish and PowerShell as being more in the Scsh direction than the Tcl direction, that is making a “proper” language at the expense of interactive use and my fingers; Elvish appears to at least have a properness-Bourneness knob but that’s hardly a solution. Anyhow, I don’t think either contributes much to our knowledge of the virtually untouched interactive-use landscape, as opposed to the relatively well-explored scripting-language landscape.)
I’m rereading this now and I realize I was probably thinking about Oil, not Elvish, or rather that my brain mixed some of the Elvish materials I read into the Oil author’s (extensive and illuminating) blog posts and on top of that called the resulting chimera by its smaller part. I’m sorry.
(I know you meant post at the top level, but I don't do that and don't have time to look up the rules for doing that.)