* Preserve compatibility with popular shells like bash.
* Address some of the broken parts in a way that makes the world better. Quote handling is the original sin of *nix shells. If somebody fixed that you would have my full attention.
Otherwise I can just stick with Bash + Python3.
In order to preserve compatibility, you must handle quotes, namespaces, etc in the same way as Bourne-derived shells, because they will be expected to run scripts that use nested interpolation, or string declarations without quotes, or whatever. Shells that use a more robust syntax, like Fish or Powershell, can't ever be compatible.
If Apple shipped some Swift-powered shell and all of their management documentation started using it, I'd bet a non-trivial portion of administrators would start to use AppleSwiftShell (although I do deeply appreciate that's a severely flawed comparison since macOS already has a sane functioning shell, but it's the best I could think of as a huge company that owns the platform pushing such a concept down)
Its doing good because it is good and people started to notice once MS propriatery chains went down.
Scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, etc., have dealt with upgrade many times. It has not always been pretty, but the alternative is stagnation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086213
And yes I drafted a blog post called "Unix Shell Should Evolve Like Perl 5" which says exactly what you are saying:
http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/07/blog-roadmap.html#the-u...
And Oil has already done it. It needs to be faster, but that's an inevitability based on progress so far.
Why Use Oil? http://www.oilshell.org/why.html
http://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/simple-word-eval....
You can try it right now. Turn on 'shopt -s simple_word_eval' to get the better behavior.
Or turn on the group 'shopt -s oil:basic' and get even more better behavior.
When those options are off, Oil runs some of the biggest shell scripts in the world. It's the shell that's most compatible with bash by a mile.
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Shell-Programs-That-Run...
String interpolation isn't done via quoting but via the format method on the string type, e.g. `"foo {} baz":format "bar"` generates the string "foo bar baz".
Similarly, to execute a command on a remote host, pass in a closure as an argument to the `remote:exec` command, like `remote:exec {1+1} "example.com"`, which will return the value 2.
I find that when quoting becomes a problem it usually means that the wrong solution has already been picked. If you're doing double quoting, you have already lost.