Correct. Backwards compatibility is both its biggest asset and its bigger problem.
In syntax alone, you can check what Herb Sutter is doing with cppfront. Specifically, the wiki page on the postfix operators is quite enlightening. It shows some interesting examples of how by making everything a postfix operator you drop the need of ->
and the duality of pre/post increment and decrement operators.
I have to admit that I never understood the need for bashrc and bash_profile. I hated that with a passion when I started to set up my bash configuration. I never saw the need to have so many files and so much complication to have a consistent shell whenever I logged in the console or spawned a konsole in KDE.
The paths shown on that diagram are 7 for bash, and 4 for zsh, so it’s surely an improvement. However, now that I have set it all on a git repository, I don’t see it as a big deal. I have a profile that sources bashrc, and then I do it all in bashrc. I’ve checked /etc/skel and it seems the distro does roughly the same (and I’ve never switched away from Debian or Debian-based in 20 years). I’m not sure if it’s such a big deal. But I’m still curious about trying zsh some day. :)
Thanks for the blog post. I’ll check it out.