Many of these next-gen shells like Nushell are clearly (and sometimes explicitly) inspired equally by Fish and by PowerShell, and it shows. It's a brilliant combination!
I think the problem with this approach is that it breaks down at some point, and then your only option is to rewrite the entire thing in a real scripting language.
Isn’t this the problem with older shells as well? Eg you have to use e.g. awk or sed to deal with more complicated text processing. My understanding that the biggest difference between powershell (and nushell) and the older bash-like shells is that they deal with structured, object-like data rather than text. How would things be any different when “things break down” vs an older shell?
One of the nice things about bash is that it interacts very nicely with Perl and Ruby.
I wonder how these other shells work with the backticks and such in Perl/Ruby. Theoretically there is room for very cool interoperability but I wonder how it goes in practice and if any nice tools and patterns are being developed.
It's a path to scaling. You can basically dump a shell script (I assume including nushell) into your .pl/.rb file with a little punctuation and then slowly refactor it to a language that can handle greater complexity.
As opposed to what? Regular shells which break down even quicker?
And there's no hard constraint that would require this to "break down at some point". A well designed shell could also be a "real scripting language", all-in-one.
But the horrible CP/M and POSIX legacy of shell design doesn't help with that.
I suppose I'm more optimistic. From my point of view, structures pipelines and some of the goodies that come with it (like better error handling), can make a shell language into a perfectly capable scripting language. I think the big weakness for these new shells is in the small sizes of their library ecosystems. But PowerShell shows what a language of this kind can do with a sizeable ecosystem and some OS integration.
