Yeah, when you dig down into the specifics I was not doing the history justice. My broader point was that it was definitely designed in a different era, with a different mindset, and has still managed to persist to this day, without that mindset shifting very much (usually for good reasons, or backward compatibility, which may or not be a good reason depending on specific circumstances)

I often wonder if shell scripts would get such a bad wrap if all the backwards compatible code was strip out and only the latest standards were put in. I think thats where it gets people so very confused & it definitely feels awkward.

I think its actually a perfectly fine language, syntactically speaking.