The temptation of writing shell scripts, illustrated
I think one of the things that still make shell scripts so alluring is that it&#x27;s the same language you use for your shell.<p>Many of my scripts for personal use were basically just cleaned up and slightly extended versions of the command sequences I typed in anyway. This is different from writing a script in a proper language where you usually start from scratch.<p>I believe, this was Perl&#x27;s approach originally: Let you use your shell commands as a starting point and then gradually extend the code in a safer language. However, this still leaves you with many of bash&#x27;s syntax issues.<p>On the opposite side, many modern languages do have REPLs - but I have not seen anyone so far use them as actual day-to-day shells.<p>So I think to really get rid of shell scripting, you&#x27;d have to develop some syntax that would work well both for scripts and for shell use.