csh was a decent interactive tool, but not great for scripting. Bourne shell had the right idea but there were so many bugs in various corners of it (I still sometimes end up writing "test "x$foo" = "xbar" even though shells that need that are long gone).
If you can depend on a recent bash and use shellcheck, then it's actually quite a pleasant programming environment, with fewer footguns than one might think. (I want a @#$@# "set -e" equivalent that returns non-zero from a function if any statement in the function results in non-zero).
There are some things that are more awkward than they should be though (e.g. given a glob, does it match 0, 1, or many files, or the way array expansions work).
Also, there's no builtin way to manage libraries (I don't know about Perl, but Python suffers from this as well). This results in me pasting a few dozen lines of shell at the top of any of my significant shell scripts, for quality-of-life functions. Then I have to use "command -v" to check if the various external programs I'm going to use are present. Say what you will about C, but a statically-linked C program can be dropped in anywhere.
Mostly agree. The modern shell scripting environment is much more robust than 30 years ago, with ShellCheck and some sane defaults, as you say. I also find it pleasant, once you get over some of its quirks.
As for managing libraries, that's true, but you can certainly import and reuse some common util functions.
For example, this is at the top of most of my scripts:
set -eEuxo pipefail
_scriptdir="$(dirname "$(readlink -f "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")")"
source "${_scriptdir}/lib.sh"
This loads `lib.sh` from a common directory where my shell scripts live, which has some logging and error handling functions, so it cuts down on repetition just like a programming language would.
If you can depend on a recent bash and use shellcheck, then it's actually quite a pleasant programming environment, with fewer footguns than one might think. (I want a @#$@# "set -e" equivalent that returns non-zero from a function if any statement in the function results in non-zero).
There are some things that are more awkward than they should be though (e.g. given a glob, does it match 0, 1, or many files, or the way array expansions work).
Also, there's no builtin way to manage libraries (I don't know about Perl, but Python suffers from this as well). This results in me pasting a few dozen lines of shell at the top of any of my significant shell scripts, for quality-of-life functions. Then I have to use "command -v" to check if the various external programs I'm going to use are present. Say what you will about C, but a statically-linked C program can be dropped in anywhere.