Thank you for writing this, it really crystalized for me why I feel the way I do about oil. I hate it. When I want a language, I want a real language like python not a weirdo jumped up shell (see what I did there?). What I want in a shell is a super small, fast, universally understood thing for basic tasks and easy expandability through tools like parallel and python.
For what it's worth, I consider oil to be closer to a unixy PowerShell rather than a more powerful bash. Note that this is not a slight, PowerShell is sweet for what it is. It (oil) really takes a hard left from the POSIX philosophy of focusing on one thing and doing it well. I'm also bitter that, if it's going to veer so far away from POSIX, that it didn't go the whole hundred and become a function language with comprehensions and such.
For what it's worth, everything you mentioned above about your approach can be done with parallel.
The point of oil that there are really basic things like safe quoting that shells should do well, yet none of the posix shell do!
Functional: there are interesting shells like Elvish. But it really goes PowerShell by adding internal rich data pipelines that dont have a unixy stream-of-bytes representation.
Oil does NOT go that way; it works on stuff like QSN to make pure unix interconnects more robust.
For what it's worth, I consider oil to be closer to a unixy PowerShell rather than a more powerful bash. Note that this is not a slight, PowerShell is sweet for what it is. It (oil) really takes a hard left from the POSIX philosophy of focusing on one thing and doing it well. I'm also bitter that, if it's going to veer so far away from POSIX, that it didn't go the whole hundred and become a function language with comprehensions and such.
For what it's worth, everything you mentioned above about your approach can be done with parallel.