(author here) Yeah I've been asked that before, and there are some things you can fix with a transpiler, but somethings you can't.

That's why the tagline to Oil is now "our upgrade path from bash to a better language AND RUNTIME".

The shell runtime needs to be fixed too, e.g. the error handling mentioned in the blog post and that I follow up on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872986

You might be able to compile that to some really long bash, but I don't think it works in general, because editing deployed scripts to fix stuff is useful (yes in production, but also on your own machine. Think of all the shell that people put on it, like virtualenv, nix-shell, rustup, etc.)

You don't want to end up with the JavaScript problem: you have a dynamic language, but ALSO A BUILD PROCESS, which is basically the worst of both worlds.