(author here) I don't think anything you wrote should be a surprise to regular readers of the blog. Many of my blog posts in the last year say "the scope of the project is too large" and similar stuff.

http://www.oilshell.org/why.html#why-not-use-it

It might be a surprise if you're only reading what shows up on news aggregators. But to be clear, I basically write about what I'm thinking, what progress has been made, etc. And I do "documentation-driven development", which is IMO the best way to design a consistent and coherent language.

The main purpose is to get people to test out the shell, and attract developers who want to push in the same direction. I like this way of working, as I've gotten a lot of valuable feedback and contributions on both OSH and Oil. And I can use more.

Oil is NOT a "product" which you can download and use. (It doesn't even have a logo, partly for that reason.) Right now it's better for say people who have the desire and ability to make it through the quick start for contributing:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Contributing (how to get a working bin/osh from git in 30 seconds on most Linux distros. You can then hack on it in pure Python and it will be fast)

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The "summer blog backlog" has some project status updates that aren't out yet, but I'll give the tl;dr version here.

There are roughly 5 equal sized parts of project, all large:

1. The compatible OSH language (mature, NOT buggy, but not fast yet)
2. The Oil language (this is 2 years old; there are bugs due to the way we reuse CPython)
3. The interactive shell (punting this to "headless shell")
4. Semi-automatic translation of the "executable spec" from Python to C++
5. Documentation

For context, last October I wrote a post saying that four features (that are DONE and polished) justify the OSH language and I can punt on the Oil language until the indefinite future.

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/10/osh-features.html

So that was one way of cutting scope. But basically I changed my mind based on prior successes. So I worked on the Oil language a lot this year, and I'm pleased with how its coming together. (The summer blog backlog has sketches of new features. Big things left: the "missing declarative part" of shell for configuration/not-YAML; functions/coprocesses as opposed to shell-like procs)

I made a big list of alternative shells, and none of them is what I want, or what I think the open source ecosystem needs:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells

This is a very long argument and has to do with the "Perlis-Thompson Principle" and "narrow waists", which I'm about 25% through explaining on the blog.

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So the other way of cutting scope is punting the interactive shell into another process, with Oil being a "headless shell":

See these two comments for details:

https://lobste.rs/s/xestey/opinionated_guide_xargs#c_cn4r2i

https://lobste.rs/s/sdum3p/if_you_could_rewrite_anything_fro... (yes I need to make blog posts out of these)

To clearly repeat what's in those posts: you won't get more than a basic interactive shell based on Oil unless someone else makes big effort. Join #shell-gui on Oil's Zulip, etc.

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So the project is now focused on #1 #2 and #5: OSH and Oil and documentation. The translation to C++ passes about half the tests, but it has stalled. So I have to come up with some way of getting that done too, and it might involve soliciting donations to hire someone, some kind of two-sided market etc.

But right now I'm just concentrating on the Oil language design and explaining it. So you might see many more compelling posts about things you won't be able to immediately use. That is on purpose!

It all absolutely works -- download it now and try it -- but there is a gap to bridge to make it production quality, which involves documentation and translation to C++.

(This post is from a year ago but may give some color on these issues: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/08/risks.html)

In addition to direct collaboration, I also encourage parallel efforts. Someone started porting Oil to Nim, and another person wanted to rewrite Oil only (not OSH) in Rust, etc. I encourage all those efforts.

The project is long, but the "hard part" OSH is quite mature (you should test it), and the "exciting part" Oil is less than 2 years old. And five years ago people said it was impossible to evolve bash into a good language. Now people seem to be taking it for granted that it should exist :)