possibly the younger generation of developers is less dogmatic about POSIX and 'portability'.

another theory is that people realized that you can use a different shell for interactive use than for scripting.

the popularity of python, perl and other languages for scripting may have helped with that.

i am looking forward to see more. fish only scratched the surface.

I don't agree with this. Or at least it's not applicable for me. I've been managing UNIX and Linux systems for around 2 decades so sadly I'm now far too old to be included as part of the younger generation any more :(

murex came about more by accident than intention. It was a personal project to "solve" a real world problem I was having at work but it kind of morphed into a shell. Even the shell aspect was very different in the beginning to what it is now. In fact almost every aspect of the shell has changed in the last 3 years.

The project is older than the Github repo because it was a private project hosted on a personal git server for the early stages of its life and I squashed the commits when uploading to Github to hide the early code (read: "mistakes") but once the project did start morphing into a shell the intention was always to make scripting a first class citizen because I specifically didn't want to use a different shell for interactive use than scripting. In fact if anything, I wanted to bring scripting paradigms to the REPL shell but without creating a command line that was too verbose for everyday use.

i see your 2 decades and i raise you 3 :-)

for a while i have been dreaming of the idea of having a real programming language for use on the commandline and i always get stuck at the verbosity of the syntax.

i didn't want to invent a new language however but possibly reuse an existing one. just that none of the languages i came across really fit.

for starters it would have to be a language that uses spaces to separate arguments, like lisp, smalltalk, red, forth and a few others. but there are more potential requirements that most languages don't really support, like being able to specify string values without quotes...

I'm with you on that one. The original murex syntax was very Javascript inspired. In fact it was even object oriented and originally called "jsh". The ironic thing is I hate JS as a language - though that's less about the syntax and more about other specific grips.

Anyhow, first I made quoting strings optional, because mandatory quotes were fucking annoying for regular use. Then the parentheses disappeared. Then the object orientated model was dropped.

Murex is a very different language now to what it was when it started; though there are still some legacy features in there which are throwbacks to early designed (eg the default data-type is called "generic", which made sense when it was OO as generic was meant to handle any content but makes less sense now that it's a first party type in its own right).

There's definitely a lot wrong with murex though. It's a long way off being a proper language. But for shell work, it has been my default daily shell for a few years now. I also use it for writing any shell scripts albeit just stuff for personal use.

From what you've posted, I'd be very interested if you ever designed a shell language. It sounds like you and I have similar desires for what the next iteration of UNIX shells should look like.