The Korn shell is the preferred programming shell by many sh addicts, but it still suffers from inherent problems in the Bourne shell's design, such as parsing and evaluation horrors. When 1003.2 becomes a real standard that companies are forced to adhere to, then we'll be in much better shape. Until then, we'll be stuck with bug-incompatible versions of the sh lying about. No vendor is shipping it yet. If you don't have to use a shell, but just want an interpreted language, many other free possibilities present themselves, like Perl, REXX, TCL, Scheme, or Python.
Some vendors even ship it standard.
If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you. You can get at networking functions, binary data, and most ofthe C library. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts, as well as a symbolic debugger. Tchrist's personal rule of thumb is that if it's the size that fits in a Makefile, it gets written in the Bourne shell, but anything bigger gets written in Perl.