advanced objects and error handling do not require tens of kilobytes of machine code. a lot of why the bourne shell is so error-prone is just design errors, many of them corrected in es and rc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rc_(Unix_shell)
https://wryun.github.io/es-shell/
They are alternative shells, both from the 90's I believe. POSIX was good in some ways, but bad in that it froze a defective shell design
It has been acknowledged as defective for >30 years
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/01/18.html#slogans-to-exp...
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es shell is heavily influenced by Lisp. And actually I just wrote a comment that said my project YSH has garbage collection, but the es shell paper has a nice section on garbage collection (which is required for Lisp-y data structures)
And I took some influence from it
Trivia: one of the authors of es shell, Paul Haahr, went on to be a key engineer in the creation of Google
"A lot of effort was made to keep ksh88 small. In fact the size you report on Solaris is without stripping the symbol table. The size that I am getting for ksh88i on Solaris is 160K and the size on NetBSD on intel is 135K.
"ksh88 was able to compile on machines that only allowed 64K text. There were many compromises to this approach. I gave up on size minimization with ksh93."