OK great, glad you have made use of the page. We had an "alternative shells" thread about a year ago between the authors of Elvish, NGS, Oh, and mash. Those were the main active/nascent shells I could find.
It might be time to start that again to see what ideas people have and what has changed. If you're interested e-mail me at [email protected].
I'm also interested in the Shill shell, which as I understand was written in Racket, and then somehow they moved away from Racket? I'm not sure. I think it was because of the runtime. I also saw some efforts to move Racket to Chez Scheme.
I very much like Racket as an idea -- a meta language -- but I haven't gotten a chance to play with it too much.
And I did experiment with femtolisp as a basis for Oil -- the lisp used to bootstrap Julia -- but I decided against it.
Rash also tries to be better than the competition by adding object pipelines (much like Powershell, it makes it much more reasonable to make system administration commands in the host language, and have rich interaction and inspection of command results), user-defineable pipeline operators, and generally tighter integration with the host language while still having a light syntax for basic commands.
I would like to be able to have my command language tightly integrated with my programming language, and be able to define my system administration commands (and interactive shell plugins and completion) as functions in the host language (while still being able to naturally use external programs). And I would like my shell scripts to be able to grow and potentially even turn into full-fledged programs, or modules of some larger program. I think there are a lot of benefits to the approach I'm using (which would be too long for a comment here).
That said, I'm not holding my breath for it to catch on widely any more than I'm holding my breath for Racket to take off as a popular programming language (although I frankly wouldn't mind either one). I think a better Posix shell is certainly a noble effort, because whatever better shell does become popular, we certainly need one. And an automatic upgrade path for existing scripts sounds great. So I salute you and wish you good luck with it. Also, as someone looking at shells and their features to copy the best ones, your wiki is a great resource. So thanks.