Unix shell programming: the next 50 years

• Unix shell is a long-standing tool with its cruft and history built over the past decades;

• the goodies

  • ease of composition gluing tools together easily

  • mostly found on Unix systems

  • capabilities for data streaming

  • interactivity and automation

• the blockers

  • too dynamic with its environment that

  • ease of composition of tools made of different programming languages with different properties made it difficult for research

  • there's no single shell environment; the current ecosystem is made of multiple implementation of the POSIX shell which is made of ~300pp describing the language, arbitrary behaviors, and extraneous tools to go along with it

• the solvable blockers

  • no easy way to handle errors; it can mean the life or death of a system with a misspelling

  • not-so-good framework for asynchronous jobs; performance is acceptable for single-threaded systems but not for multi-threaded ones; that said, it does exist once you've made yourself familiar with it

  • redudant computation; several tools like roam:GNU Make does address it but not fully

  • not exactly fitting with the modern deployment systems

• some projects to look forward to

  • Jash

  • Smoosh

  • Posh and Pash