If I were King I would ban environment variables from the OS entirely. Global mutable state is the root of all evil! Globals are evil evil evil and the modern reliance on bullshit environment variables is a plague upon reliability.
Well, environment variables are not "global" globals. They are just my globals, or my post-it notes for some variables. Because they are not per-user even. They are per user session.
10 processes can have completely different set of values for the same environment variables, because they are in their own environments, and apparently, that's useful.
There are foot guns, and there are unintentional consequences of implementation and design details. This is why we patch, improve and rewrite our software over time. To iron out these kinks.
Fire is also have a tendency to cause collateral damage. So use both fire and environment variables responsibly, and world will be a better place.
I definitely think a lot of filesystem access is a code smell and probably not the right thing. That one causes me a lot of pain. But that’s largely because I work in games and you really need to use the Unity/Unreal/whatever asset management system instead of direct file system access.
I’ve got a small build system and the first thing it does is nuke PATH to empty. It’s glorious. No more grabbing random shit from a big blob with untracked dependencies that varies wildly by system!
I could easily live my entire life without environment variables. They’re just a fundamentally bad idea. Every program that foolishly uses environment variables can be replaced by a better program that takes a config file or arglist.
Honestly sometimes I think the answer is yes. Imagine how happy we could be, and how many fewer problems we would have. Add printers to that list and you're describing a paradise.
Kill it all with fire.