It wont. And stuff like Solaris and AIX still lives on and uses /bin/sh and has been incredibly slow to embrace even bash, and configure scripts still need to support them. Plus any change you make today won't be remotely universal until 10 years has passed.
And back in 2005-ish I thought for sure that we'd have standardized on perl as a replacement for bash scripting by now.
But if everyone on Linux and BSD uses bash/OSH, and Solaris AIX use /bin/sh, it will be a success. The latter platforms do not influence the rest of computing very much -- they lag behind.
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The busybox shell and the FreeBSD shell have been gaining bash features lately -- which means they are gaining OSH features.
Because OSH is the most bash-compatible shell, by a mile. There's no other project like it.
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I agree with the logic -- it is very hard to change languages.
It's like changing English to Esperanto. The inertia is incredible.
So you need to provide an upgrade path, and that's what Oils does. OSH is compatible, and YSH is a new design.
Sure but the problem is that Solaris/AIX will be very slow to actually install it, so you can't count on it being there, and those distros DO influence things like autoconf and configure scripts. And people who run them pay big money contracts to get those distros supported (one bank contract for support is worth much more than 10,000 linux users who don't pay anyone a dime). The inertia is very real, bigger than you even think, and you can't wave it off by suggesting they don't influence computing.
At any rate, you need to actually accomplish everyone on Linux and BSD having that available and having used it for the past 10 years first. And get the core distros switching over to using it so that the glue code in the distro is all YSH plus probably python and some legacy sh. Actually show me that.
And yeah, I think the analogy of trying to change English to Esperanto is about right. I learned about Esperanto in the mid-80s...
Shell is used A LOT -- for data science, machine learning, cloud, CI, putting together Linux distros / boostrapping, embedded systems, and other heterogeneous problems.
configure is one use case. And autoconf in particular will probably be around forever, regardless of the existence of Solaris/AIX -- for the simple reason that many old and important packages like coreutils use autoconf.
Probably nobody is going to rewrite the coreutils build system soon. (coreutils might be rewritten/obsolete before that happens!)
The good news is that OSH can run configure scripts as-is :) It's actually easy to run them, because they are meant to run on many different shells.
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It's also not a binary yes/no thing. Cobol and Fortran aren't dead, but people choose to write new projects in different languages now, and that's good! I had an entire career without seeing any Cobol at all. Zero.
Likewise OSH can run POSIX configure scripts forever (and those same configure scripts can be run by /bin/sh and bash)
But I think lots of people will choose to write brand new YSH scripts as well.
The computing world is only getting more heterogeneous (in both time and space). Shell accomodates that, and Oils is designed to accomodate that.
