I still don't get why bash (or zsh) don't try to integrate more Korn shell (88 & 93) scripting features. But there the focus seems more on more colorful prompts and autocompletion handholding…
And even despite more free licenses (AFAIR, IANAL), you can't depend on actual Korn shells being available on Unices. At least the dependent app situation has been getting a lot better, mostly by the death of workstations and their proprietary OSs (try depending on almost any grep/awk/sed option/switch when it has to run on Solaris/AIDX/HP-UX).
Although "all the world's a GNU/Linux" seems the new plague upon our lands here…
So after all these years, I'd say we're still in pretty much the same situation that birthed Perl. Which still would be my preferred choice if I'd actually have to distribute scripts and we're not talking about my own private, context-specific shortcuts, scripts and functions.
And even despite more free licenses (AFAIR, IANAL), you can't depend on actual Korn shells being available on Unices. At least the dependent app situation has been getting a lot better, mostly by the death of workstations and their proprietary OSs (try depending on almost any grep/awk/sed option/switch when it has to run on Solaris/AIDX/HP-UX). Although "all the world's a GNU/Linux" seems the new plague upon our lands here…
So after all these years, I'd say we're still in pretty much the same situation that birthed Perl. Which still would be my preferred choice if I'd actually have to distribute scripts and we're not talking about my own private, context-specific shortcuts, scripts and functions.