Look at the Linux systemd / init debate. Despite the fact that sysvinit is clearly ancient, awful technology there are still people who have spend time learning it and don't want something better.
Another example: bash. Clearly an awful awful language/shell but it sticks around because too many people can't admit that the thing they know is rubbish.
If you ask people why they use bash, and why they don't like systemd, you get perfectly reasonable answers. (I'm not going to go into them here for obvious reasons.) You can't just dismiss these people as stick-in-the-muds.
You should try thinking about what a better bash would look like, it's not as simple as you make it to be. I think the best I've seen in this direction is rc and I think that's still not enough to compensate for the loss of ubiquity.
The stuff people come up when they try to "redesign the unix terminal" (usually some javascript contraption) is always extremely lacking.
* Image support (I can't remember where I saw this but it exists)
* Structured data piping (in Powershell)
* Machine-readable command-line arguments, which would enable...
* ...Proper autocomplete (like in IDEs)
* Real types (Bash is 'stringly typed')
* Sanity (e.g. look at how `[` is implemented in Bash; none of that)
* A better way to integrate with programs than running them on the command line (e.g. shell bindings).
That last one would be tricky and really requires moving away from the C ABI as the Lingua Franca of libraries. That is probably quite far away in the future unfortunately.
[1] http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/137kd9/18_mont...
It's kind of a "cheat," but I've been really happy playing with xonsh (which is essentially bash + ipython)[0]. Bash with better control flow and types... it's suddenly not so maddening anymore.
>>> print("my home is $HOME")
my home is $HOME
>>> echo "my home is $HOME"
my home is /home/snail
Loading an entire development environment into your CLI is ten tons of bad news in a five pound bag.
... is not the same as the Bourne Again shell and scripting language, that IshKebab was talking about.
Likewise with bash, what's the better alternative? And don't say fish. Just because it bills itself as such doesn't make it an improvement. All tools have some overhead to learning them.
IMO, bash sticks around because a lot of people still find it useful.
Example: I have 2 mins to check if a duplicate line has occured in a log file with some arbitrary logging format. One pipeline later, I have an answer.