Try Tom Duff's rc shell: http://rc.cat-v.org

Is available on *nix systems as part of Plan 9 from User Space: http://plan9.us

Interesting. I'll give it a go.

I've tried living in iPython and eshell, and while I prefer python or lisp as a programming language to almost anything, neither is nearly as quick and dirty as sh for doing stuff with stdin/out from a pipeline of tools. I don't quite know what a better language than sh would look like, but a man can dream.

Also, universe, if you're going to get on fixing the sh problem, can we restructure how the shell operates entirely? Don't do argument expansion! This is one area where the Unix Haters got it really right.

Please define "argument expansion".

In many (all?) unix shells, globs are expanded by the shell before being passed to the program.

   'ls *.jpg' 

is passed expanded to 'ls 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg' BEFORE ls is run. This choice means that if a program wants to use another style of regular expression (ie: pcre), it must be enclosed in quotes on the shell, ie:

  "ls | grep -P '.*jpg'"

Yes, that's globbing, but I was wondering what the OP meant by argument expansion. It could be just globbing, or include globbing but extend to variable expansion, braces, command substitution... It's hard to put a case that having the shell do these things is the right way to do it without understanding the OP's point clearly.

Minor point: if the glob doesn't match it isn't expanded. Sometimes useful. I rarely escape scp commands for instance.

See `failglob' elsewhere on this page. What you suggest is sometimes useful but also sometimes wrong and hard to spot because the glob might match locally and one not realise.

You might like to look at scheme shell.