UNIX is dead, no one cares anymore. It's just Linux now. Your examples and complaints are both outdated and not in good faith.
For all the weirdos smashing that downvote button: How about you name me some UNIX distros you have ran in the past year? Other than Linux, OpenBSD (~0.1% market share btw) and ostensibly MacOS (which we all know has dropped any pretense of caring to be UNIX-like many years ago), that is.
I'll update my examples when your examples of how it's been fixed don't use the same arcane syntax and semantics as the 48 year old Bourne shell. That's the whole point, which you're still missing.
> $ bash -c '[ $((1 + 1)) = 2 ]; echo $?'
Not even Perl uses that much arcane punctuation to test if 1 + 1 = 2. As if [] isn't enough, you've got to throw in two more levels of (()), plus enough grawlix profanity for a Popeye comic strip. And people complain Lisp has too many parens. Sheez.
I prefer ITS DDT (aka HACTRN), with its built-in PDP-10 assembler and disassembler, that lets you do things like your login file customizing your prompt in assembly code to print the time by making system calls, without actually spawning any sub-jobs to merely print the time:
..PROMPT
holds the instruction which DDT uses to type out a "*".
You can replace it with any other instruction.
To use "%" instead of "*", deposit $1#%$> in that location
($> to avoid clobbering the opcode without having
to know what it is)
If you have to use arcane syntax and grawlix profanity, you should at least have direct efficient access to the full power of the CPU and operating system.
I keep submitting PR’s to get my assembler extensions in Fish and ZSH but so far no avail. Ideally all scripting should be done in single-clock-cycle assembly statements.
I mean it makes write-only languages like Perl look like beautiful prose but it’s hard to argue about efficiently setting the 20 environment variables used by my terraform jobs with a mere 20 clock cycles. It may seem silly but every clock cycle truly matters.
And even that, only bash, because I wouldn't consider the state of X Windows and Wayland fixed in any way, shape, or form.