Linux

I'm a developer who does the whole devops thing and I'd consider systemd to be a professional tool with pretty advanced features. My team deploys and operates Kubernetes across tens of thousands of VMs (using our own images, not managed node pools), and all those nodes are using systemd as the foundational service manager.

Shepherd just seems to be another implementation of service management that's centered around the use of GNU Scheme. I think it's neat, and it's far more flexible than systemd units. Flexibility is good, but to much flexibility also lets you build your own footguns. I have no idea if Shepherd lets you build a gun to blow your foot off, so this may not be a concern at all. Scheme is a really powerful language that I know nothing about, so I'm going to assume that the GNU folks are using language features (or the runtime itself) to prevent accidental amputation. The example service looks almost entirely declarative which gives me warm fuzzies.

As an example of something too flexible, just look at old sysvinit scripts. You could do literally anything you wanted because you were just writing Bash. Bash is already the shittiest language in existence and service management is hard, so there were a lot of terribly broken init scripts out there (which is why systemd was created).

From an aesthetic perspective, I do kinda hate Scheme (and the example service by extension). My eyes just do not want to read it, but that's a personal failing. Many folks love Scheme and lispy languages.

EDIT: I used "Scheme" a lot, but to be technically correct, I should have been saying Guile. It's GNU's implementation of Scheme with some nice extensions.