[cben]

The author of Oil Shell has some of the best writing on why unix shells are an important niche to push forward.

Unix (and later the internet), by enforcing "narrow waists" [1] like a flat stream of octets for all communication, is inherently polyglot. You can have richer data types inside programming languages, and indeed Python, JS, Rust etc. all have vibrant ecosystems of packages with rich internal APIs. But at some point you want to interface software written in widely different languages, and Unix encourages a particular style of command-line interface which is "dumber" — array of arguments, flat file(s) I/O — but is easy to compose across languages.

Therefore, whatever you do in "better" languages, there remains a need for a glue layer whose main job is not doing computation itself but invoking external processes. There is tons of arguing about the threshold — whether a particular task is better expressed inside a "rich" language or by plumbing together commands — but it doesn't change the need for a good shell language to exist.

Now, is bash a great shell language? NO. It's a pragmatic choice for historic reasons. One day we'll do much better. [2]

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html [2] https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells