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.
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...