I remember seeing shell for the first time ~15 years ago, and it certainly looked like an arcane ritual.

Syntax like var=value and [ x -eq y ] was super weird coming from C and Python.

My Oil project fixes many of these problems:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht...

(as well as fixing semantic problems; it's not just syntax)