> It was meant to efficiently automate systems tasks.

Shell was designed to launch processes easily. Unix philosophy pushed to make every function an application. And that's ultimately what shell "syntax" is.

There's shockingly little syntax in the shell. A lot of what we think of as "shell syntax" is actually full blown (standard) programs which the shell is launching. My favorite of which is `[`.

What makes shell unique vs all other programming languages is it puts launching processes first. It has no friction there because if it did, it wouldn't work.

This is also what I think is gross about shell. Every other scripting language has at least some friction when launching other processes and that's usually a good thing IMO.