I've tried fish / zsh and I've found them both a bit underwhelming. They were prettier and a bit more convenient, but IIRC in both cases the thing that made me pack it in after a trial was trying to run bash scripts written by other people. They would interpret them differently (once in a subtle, really annoying way) and give weird error messages.

I am curious about oil but I found the "why use oil shell" explanation also slightly underwhelming. I'm also a bit concerned that its sales pitch seems to be almost entirely about "fixing" bash so that it is a better/stricter language. This is setting off alarm bells in my head coz it sounds like the exact same merry go round as last time.

Like the author I heartily agree bash is a shit language and I'll never use it to script anything over 25 SLOC, but the shell is so embedded at this point that I'm loath to switch unless there are some really big wins and/or the transition is seamless. I'm unconvinced of either in this case.

I do get the sense that there's some depth to this shell that isn't readily apparent from a surface glance and there is a lot that has been very carefully thought out, but whether that translates into some notion of "abstract language purity" or something that will actually benefit me on a day to day basis isn't clear.

I also don't quite get this:

>Why not use only Python? Because I'd rather write 100 lines of shell + 100 lines of Python than 500 lines of Python. This is basically the Unix Philosophy, and I didn't understand it until after I'd been programming for many years.

I don't think I've ever written a python program that could be decomposed into 100 lines of shell + 100 lines of python. I'm curious as to what kind of example the author had in their head when they wrote this.

In general I find python programs to be no longer than an equivalent shell, safer and often shorter, largely thanks to the library ecosystem.