Wow, very impressive. Do you also believe it's a viable language with which newcomers should start writing scripts?

Edit: follow up question is Do you believe bash / POSIX shells actually follow KISS principles?

Not questioning whether your OS is KISS, but I don't think that necessarily reflects the KISS-ness of the underlying language.

My questions clearly reflect my current impression that in the long term, shell pitfalls largely undermine the benefits of its apparent simplicity. The gist would be for you to provide some way to change my mind. I guess the codebase you provide is a strong counter example; but you'll agree it doesn't reflect general usage of shell in the wild.

Edit 2: You know what, I just read your original comment again. I kind of retract my question since you do concede that it's an uphill battle and you love it in spite of its flaws. I guess that's cool (and I agree it's fun trying to write correct bash as a challenge) as long as you're in control of the code being produced, but my main impression remains that it's a bad language to publicize and its presence in most codebases inherently bears a strong cost.