Personally I think the complexity from tools like bash come from lack of evolution.
As a thought experiment, why couldn't bash have a better assignment statement available?
In other words, something like:
set --goodass
a = string1 + '.' + string2
This would cut through SO much of the shell quoting nonsense that you deal with.
another tool like "make" would benefit too.
I think 6 months of development to "make" to have usable variables, clear ways of manipulating paths and filenames and making targets more usable... that would be better than 6 months of creating complex makefiles.
As a thought experiment, why couldn't bash have a better assignment statement available?
In other words, something like:
set --goodass
a = string1 + '.' + string2
This would cut through SO much of the shell quoting nonsense that you deal with.
another tool like "make" would benefit too.
I think 6 months of development to "make" to have usable variables, clear ways of manipulating paths and filenames and making targets more usable... that would be better than 6 months of creating complex makefiles.