[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

["Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>]

In this week's BSDNow.tv podcast, available at

        https://www.bsdnow.tv/409

there is a story about a new conference paper on the Unix shell.  The
paper is available at

	Unix shell programming: the next 50 years
	HotOS '21: Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Ann
	Arbor, Michigan, 1 June, 2021--3 June, 2021
	https://doi.org/10.1145/3458336.3465294

The tone is overall negative, though they do say nice things about
Doug McIlroy and Steve Johnson, and they offer ideas about
improvements.

List readers will have their own views of the paper.  My own is that,
despite its dark corners, the Bourne shell has served us
extraordinarily well, and I have been writing in it daily for decades
without being particularly bothered by the many issues raised by the
paper's authors.  Having dealt with so-called command shells on
numerous other operating systems, at least the Unix shells rarely get
in my way.

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