These days I think it's clear that the dominant use case for shell scripts is not a full time responsibility but rather edge work for deploying/installing code written in other languages. Most people looking at shell code aren't going to be shell masters, they're going to be engineers of more modern things that have to look at the shell script for some reason.

> ...they're going to be engineers of more modern things...

Have you read TAOUP? The entire Unix philosophy hinges around the shell, since the shell is the tool that lets you glue different pieces together. The shell is not outdated.

If you live entirely within one language ecosystem, then you may be tempted to consider the shell an afterthought, and make all services available via API calls instead. But this is inefficient, slows down development, reduces flexibility and limits the capabilities of your programs. This fallacy is old and certainly is not "modern". See TAOUP for details; it explains this far better than I ever could.

But a lot of the defaults in the bourne shell and various posix utilities are wrong. One example: space as a field separator is clearly the wrong default, since it's nearly impossible to not find file-names with spaces in them these days.

"This is, however, the bread and butter of shell programming."

This is really old-fashioned thinking. The people who have been in this industry for 10+ years all grew up without computers - and thus had to memorize all of the flags, obscure shell commands, and weird regular expression. What was taught in school back then was to do things perfectly the first time, because CPU cycles were expensive, and bugs were time consuming.

The generation that graduated from college about 2 years ago is the first one that had universal access to a search engine since they knew how to use a computer. This generation (and all future ones for the rest of time) sees memorizing things like this as more of a waste of mental space. What is taught in Universities now is problem solving, research, and larger concepts. There is very little straight memorization, and almost zero programming by hand/whiteboard programming. No current college grad will be able to write a shell script without reference material, but every college grab should be able to write any simple script in less than 5 minutes with Google.

You're going to have a hard time making it through Hemingway if you have to reach for a dictionary every time you come across a word like "middleweight" or "khaki", even if your dictionary is online and answers your query in less than a second. You need to memorize the meanings of a vocabulary of words in order to read fluently or write well. That's not "old-fashioned thinking". It's just common sense. And it's just as true of shell scripts as it is of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, poetry, or math.

While both the above words are known to me, I do like that when reading a book in Kindle on my iPad, I can tap a word, and have its definition show.

They probably think they invented sex too. ;-)

Memorisation isn't the issue. Knowing the tools available and their options is. That comes with study. Unix command line is a boon for problem solving and experimentation, just go and read Jon Bentley's _Programming Pearls_. One can't Google for what one doesn't realise can be done.