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To elucidate, programming languages have their own vocabulary and rules just like a human language (and often, the rules are far more consistent and the vocabulary smaller) --- to ask questions like "Why not `list`?" is like asking "Why is the plural of sheep, sheep? Why is it called a mouton in French? Why not sheepe?"

But unlike normal languages, software languages are designed. So asking why questions makes a lot more sense.

The weird names was only one of his complaints and it's relatively minor. Everything about bash seems really weird and over complicated. I am trying to learn it now. It's great for trivial stuff, but for anything nontrivial I end up going back to a real programming language.

I wanted to do floating point math. The recommended answer is to pipe your data into a better programming language. You can't even do math in bash. On another occasion I wanted to make a simple program that opens a random file. The recommended answer breaks in the simple case where files have spaces in them. The correct answer I found is this horrible mess of weird characters and it's completely incomprehensible. The best answer someone submitted was just to call one line of python from bash...

The fact that your shell is not a programming language is not a real gripe. Treat your shell as a shell and you'll be fine.

Ok sure, but being able to perform operations on a bunch of files shouldn't be hard in a shell language. And mathematical operations are an incredibly basic thing that are necessary for almost anything.

And why is it so wrong for the shell to be a decent programming language? It's not impossible. It doesn't need to make anything harder or more complicated. And it adds a ton of functionality. There are tons of people programming in Bash and powershell anyway.

> You can't even do math in bash.

You shouldn't, certainly, but, as to 'can't', I think that `expr` (or, as I just learned from ABS, `$(( ))`) covers a lot of basic uses: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/arithexp.html .

The correct answer I found is this horrible mess of weird characters and it's completely incomprehensible.

Someone who tries to learn Chinese may have the same thought after having been exposed to nothing but English. The keyword is "language".

The quoting rules in bash/sh are not difficult to memorise, and definitely a must-learn.

I wanted to do floating point math.

Maths is not a strong point of shell languages because they were designed more for string manipulation and gluing other programs together. Try doing pipelines and redirection in a "real programming language", for a contrasting example.

"The right tool for the job".

> In fact I'd say super-verbose and somewhat convoluted languages like PowerShell (and C#, which I don't fancy much either --- nor its Java-ish ancestry, for that matter) may only appear to be more intuitive at first, but are actually hiding some quite nonintuitive complexity. The verboseness may make it easier to get started, but becomes a hindrance thereafter.

Some historical syntax ancestry aside, state-of-the-art C# is too classy and elegant to be in the same sentence with Java.

Modern C# seems confused about what it is. I think a lot of stuff should exist exclusively in F#. And C# is just as bureaucratic in nature as Java.

Not really. The direction is clear; C# evolves with the times (still, the only version to have broken backwards compatibility was 2.0 because of Generics - which was/is a good thing) . Currently, it's at the very base, an object oriented programming language with powerful functional style features. The bureaucracy you're referring to is at worst (not for Java though) it's static type system, which again is a good thing under the right application scenario.