> I don't disagree with you in the context of public [things], but [...] extensions to the standard make my work in [private] areas [...] happy to lock myself into [a non-standard].
This is the best argument I know in favour of not standardising, and the danger is not the direct consequences, but rather than our expertise in the standard atrophies when we do most of our work outside of it, which means our public work suffers too.
Also sometimes the private goes public and then who's gonna fund redesigning it in the standard? That rarely happens.
> From my PoV it is generally portable anyway: almost everywhere I use a shell of that nature bash is present.
A key difference is that bash is not claiming to be standard where it is not. It implements the full standard as well as its own extensions. It does not do standard things wrong¹ in order for its extensions to work².
I see posix-sh/bash more like javascript/typescript than good-browsers/internet-explorer. Which makes me wonder: is there a gnu/bash->posix/sh converter out there…
--
[1] well, there are a few oddities, like == behaviour in test which can cause portability issues because the standard doesn't specify that and people might accidentally use it when trying to be as portable as possible, but this also affects sh so is a general environment issue not specifically a bash related one. Also that doesn't break standard portable behaviour.
[2] or in the case of IE, doing standard things wrong, and its own extension wrong between versions too!
This is the best argument I know in favour of not standardising, and the danger is not the direct consequences, but rather than our expertise in the standard atrophies when we do most of our work outside of it, which means our public work suffers too.
Also sometimes the private goes public and then who's gonna fund redesigning it in the standard? That rarely happens.
> From my PoV it is generally portable anyway: almost everywhere I use a shell of that nature bash is present.
Much like Internet Explorer 6, you mean.