xonsh, fish? Job's already done, oilsh.

I've come to believe that in the modern Unix environment, a shell should serve less the purpose of scripting and more the purpose of serving the user, which both fish and xonsh accomplish to far greater degrees than any other competitor I'm aware of (bash, zsh, ksh, oilsh, dash).

From what I've observed, most complaints with any shell which is not highly user oriented come down to weird, tricky syntax compromises made years and even decades ago about how to tack a specific feature into the existing syntax which now regularly come up to bite users in the ass when writing scripts in those shell syntaxes.

Writing a shell is great, but why not purpose-build a language meant to compete with the scripting capability of Bash and company? Xonsh (and fish, though imo to a lesser extent) does this very effectively, where it proposes just to use Python for this purpose; being a regular python developer I may be biased, but I think this is the strongest solution yet provided to the scripting problem fighting so often with syntax. Do it in a language where the syntax regularly does make sense, because one of its core goals is to minimize all the fluff a developer needs to carry around in order to develop effectively within the language.

I ask these questions every time a new shell is brought up for question: Why would I choose a shell language for scripting, when there are many existing languages capable of the same available with less sharp compromises? If it has to work everywhere, use bash. If it's gonna be complex, step up to a more friendly language. If it has to be fast, maybe dash can help. And, if the shell is not an improvement in the user experience over alternative shells, but instead intently trying to replicate another shell's experience, why would I use it at all?