I'd say that containers are actually something that makes Unix shell a lot more valuable and predictable, and one reason that I'm working on https://www.oilshell.org/ .
A container is basically a "virtualenv" for shell, and it's honestly better than that because:
- it's more general (it isolates every language, not just Python), and
- not even bigger (e.g. an Alpine Linux container is not that much bigger than the Python install in every virtualenv!)
Traditionally you do indeed have the problem that copying a shell script from one machine to another basically guarantees you nothing about how it will work. These days we deploy containers, which solve the problem, and that's why shell is used so much in the cloud (e.g. anything with Github Actions has a boatload of shell)
A container is basically a "virtualenv" for shell, and it's honestly better than that because:
- it's more general (it isolates every language, not just Python), and
- not even bigger (e.g. an Alpine Linux container is not that much bigger than the Python install in every virtualenv!)
Traditionally you do indeed have the problem that copying a shell script from one machine to another basically guarantees you nothing about how it will work. These days we deploy containers, which solve the problem, and that's why shell is used so much in the cloud (e.g. anything with Github Actions has a boatload of shell)
Even more on that: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/07/cloud-review.html