A lot of the sins of shell are from it's primary role as an interactive interface to the computer. it's use as a scripting language was a nice secondary goal.

On the one hand it is nice to have your interactive interface and your scripts be the same language. on the other it is a bit horrifying the way all those convenient interactive features make your programs so prone to failure.

We'd probably all be better off if our scripts weren't in the same language as used by our interactive interface. I do paste snippets of scripting (if, for, etc.) into my interactive terminal from time to time, but that's rare compared to just typing commands to run.

I wouldn't mind it if all scripting in the shell had to be offloaded to a completely separate language that was less error prone and more consistent.

> The `let ++` example is pretty damning.

Seems kind of logical, the following c code behaves the same way.

  #include <stdio.h>

  int test(void) {
          int i=0;
          return i++;
  }
  
  void main(void) {
          printf("i = %d\n", test());
  }

'let i++' evaluates to / returns 0 before increasing i, just like c would.

I don't mean what it returns, I mean that returning non-zero trips up Bash into thinking it's a non-successful error code. The fact that doing math can trip up error detection implies a fundamental design flaw of the system. Which, I mean, we're in Bash, of course it's poorly designed. I didn't know it was quite this bad though.

Interesting.. that might be part of why I fell in love with this ugly monster called Bash scripting.