Most people think shell is just bash, and portability is impossible.

It is also common sense that shell scripts are just glue code, and it's impossible to do anything else with it.

I think they're wrong. Never said one should use this to write large production programs though.

The hacks I'm using are no different than JavaScript polyfills (set once, makes a feature more uniform). It's actually a clean design, the bulk of the program is POSIX shell.