Bash development roadmap

[Léa Gris]

As I see periodic features requests for Bash in this list. They most 
often misses some background plan or justification beyond QOL 
improvement for script coder, so they can have same feature as with 
other language.

I always thought that Bash DNA was tied to orchestrating actions from 
commands forming a shell around a Unix kernel, with characters streams 
forming the data backbone for Bash to interact with system commands.

The strength of Bash is that it is exactly fit as a shell, and it has 
enough POSIX and even Bash versions available in a wide variety of 
systems environments ; so that if you write Bash scripts avoiding 
cutting-edge features, or limit yourself to features with a decade old 
maturity, you can expect mostly flawless compatibility.

Then I have concerns about all the requests for implementing new 
features, especially those features that would turn Bash into an 
all-purpose programming language, loosing grounds with its designed role 
in Unix systems.

I'd like to see more mid-term or long term plans to keep Bash relevant 
ten years from now, with systems evolving more with event-driven 
operations; processes exchanging more structured data streams such as 
JSON or XML. Bash can barely deal with these format with external 
parsers, but then struggle to work with the data because it has no 
built-in internal hierarchical structures for it.

I remember Chet mention future modules to deal with various formats, and 
it feels like a sound approach to deal with these structured data 
formats, but still Bash will struggle to use these with only arrays and 
associative arrays.

I also wonder if it is even realistic to get Bash evolving to keep-up 
with more modern data structures and formats, when other scripting 
languages like Python are increasingly occupying the place of shell 
scripts. I can see how Perl lost grounds while it gained features but 
loosing relevance.

What is on Bash's roadmap for the next ten or twenty years for it to 
remain a relevant tool, or is it going to maintain status-quo as a 
fall-back scripting tool you expect being on every systems, even older 
and no longer supported ones?

--
Léa Gris