> System shell, however, isn't meant for writing entire applications.

Programmable shells are, in fact, for programming. That posix shell syntax makes it impractical for meaningfully large scripts is something you just accept. And, realistically, it is something you have to accept.

Minimalism isn't why posix shell syntax is bad. For example, awk and jq are minimal but don't make the same mistakes.

Powershell was never designed to be your system shell (Windows doesn't really rely on one) but the main reason it can't be the shell is startup time, which rules it out of wrapper scripts. Its having lots of features might contribute to that but it's not the problem per se (being built on .net is the reason - that and startup time not really mattering on windows). Its lacking the syntax problems of posix shells is very much not a problem. Powershell's error handling is just fine, by the way.

The startup time of even pwsh is too slow to be usable in many scenarios.

PowerShell's not going to be the system shell on your *nix box but it wasn't designed to be. But your posix shell isn't the system shell because it's better. It's pretty much the ultimate expression of worse is better.

That's why there's an industry of alternatives without the faults, such as oil, elvish, fish, nushell. And why awk is so popular.

> Another important feature of a tool like this is the ability to tolerate errors: I can't imagine a Linux today that would be able to even boot if the shell was extra pedantic about errors. A lot of mostly irrelevant things routinely fail on boot and during normal operation. Stamping them all out is an arduous...

You seem to be implying PowerShell aborts on any error. That's not the case:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

My main issue with attempting to replace Bash with other shells is that they're often not installed by default on different Linux flavours and they don't/won't have the same longevity as Bash. Try running PowerShell on a 20 year old Linux system or maybe find out if there's some version issue with running an old script 20 years in the future.

Well said, esp. the last paragraph about the Microsoft strategy.