I want to be clear, what I meant by 'quality' above is functioning systems. If there's a hodge-podge solution that gives you a 10x improvement at the cost of 1/2x the productivity vs. an "elegant" framework that gives you a 2x improvement at 1/10x the productivity by requiring to re-invent all the tools, the 'hodge-podge' solution wins.
To me, this is the same basic argument of Dvorak vs qwerty keyboards. Dvorak might be a 1-2x improvement over qwerty but qwerty wins because of cultural momentum. The improvement isn't worth uprooting the infrastructure already in place.
I think programming languages suffer the same fate, where the size of code base, libraries, etc. secures it as the lingua franca even if there are other languages that are marginally better.
As a rule of thumb, I think a replacement needs to be at 10x the improvement before it has a chance of uprooting entrenched systems.
The Unix system might be chaotic but it's had a lot of time to adapt to different needs. There's also a culture of freedom, sharing and experimentation that isn't present in the Windows world. These all have real world implications on what tools are available for experimentation, use and improvement.
> If you got sat down and told to come up with a set of composable command-line tools for a shell, the end result would have nothing at all in common with the bash/GNU tools. There is nothing there worth repeating.
Sorry, no. This sounds like an emotional plea rather than anything rooted in critical thinking. Sorting text files isn't worth repeating? Searching text files isn't worth repeating? Piping text from one process to another isn't worth repeating? I've tried to be even keeled in my responses but this is ridiculous.
It's like pointing to a shanty town and saying it is "quality housing" because it has a high population density.
I'm reminded of a recent interview with Jim Keller, who's famous for being one of the architects of the x86 instruction set, Apple's ARM CPUs, AMD's Zen architecture, and Tesla' AI chip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
An interesting throwaway quote, but actually a deep insight, is that he thinks a lot of things should be "redesigned every 5 years or so", but unfortunately are redesigned only every decade or longer.
I totally agree. PowerShell was a clean-slate design, and was called "Monad Shell" originally. It's elegant, and is based on a cohesive concept. It's now 10 years old and starting to accumulate... inconsistencies. Warts. It's in need of a clean-slate design again.
Bash and the GNU tools are the most random mess imaginable that can still function. Its components can trace their roots back to the 1960s. Ancient code that should have been rewritten from scratch a dozen times over. Like you said, it's "evolution", but evolution gave us the trigeminal nerve and the inverted retina. I want a designed system that doesn't take the scenic route and have things back to front because it was "always done that way and is too hard to change now".
If you got sat down and told to come up with a set of composable command-line tools for a shell, the end result would have nothing at all in common with the bash/GNU tools. There is nothing there worth repeating.