Shell is evil mainly because it's so old. It's largely unchanged since 1978 and had to run on incredibly resource limited machines. What it could achieve on those machines was amazing. Tradeoffs would be different today, e.g. PowerShell.
I don’t think these issues would necessarily be solved at all by waving a hand and replacing it with similarly complex build tools. Bazel, for example, can be a daunting tool to fully grasp. Any tool used should be well understood. Easier said than done of course.
And shell has a lot of footguns.
That said, what can help drastically here are well-defined best practices and conventions built into the language which, admittedly, bash really doesn’t have.
- Mutating default arguments to functions, so subsequent calls have different behavior
- Somewhat particular rules around creating references vs copies
- Things that look like lambda captures but aren’t quite
- Bash: installed everywhere you want to work (yes, who actually wants to work on Windows ;-)
- C/C++: when speed/size matters there was no alternative except Assembly until recently
- Javascript: until recently this was the most sane option for client side code on the web (Active X and Java applets existed yes but managed to be even worse.)
- PHP: Low cost hosting, Function-As-A-Service way before that became popular, shared nothing architecture, instant reload for local development bliss
- cannot know which object attributes are private or public (and some classes use settable properties so you can't say "just don't set any attributes on non-dataclass objects")
As long as you apply the same standards to what seems to be everyones darling: Javascript.
Javascript has the same amount of footguns as PHP and Bash but has gotten away with it by being cute (and having a whole menagerie if support tools around it to make it possible for ordinary people to write workable code in it).
(Yes, I am qualified to rant about Javascript BTW. I wrote a working map rendering system with pan and zoom and automatic panning based on GPS location using ECMAScript and SVG back in the spring of 2005. I think roughly half a year before Google Maps became public. Back before all the modern JS tooling existed. All I had was JEdit with syntax highlighting. Perl at least let me put breakpoints in my code even back then.
And yes, I have written more JS since then.)
Now you can at least just stick to React and TypeScript and bundle it using Webpack and have months of relative sanity between each time you have to throw something out and replace it.
-> REPL essentially for free (the language IS a REPL)
-> enormous installed base
-> No compilation (well, unless you have something--like autotools--using shell as essentially a transpilation target)
-> No need for "libraries" in most cases: the ordinary CLI that $vendor already ships can be used right away, with no need for a custom SDK for whatever "real" language you would otherwise be using. For example, if you are already familiar with the "aws" CLI program, it's trivial to treat it as an "API" for a quick shellscript instead of needing to dig into the boto3 docs to do something equivalent the "right" way.
-> Pretty good integration with standard *nix facilities (redirecting STD{ERR,OUT}, checking existence of files/pipes, checking/setting exit codes, etc.)
I might agree with "it's not hard to learn it", but I don't agree with "it's not hard to remember it".
I really don't understand this point, its a script language, how old is it doesn't make any difference. I've come accross some Powershell scripts that were unreadable down to its verbosity with certain things, and if you don't already know all the flags and options for it, it's hopeless to try and understand.
Both serve a purpose, neither are 'evil'.