[danpalmer]

> Why would bash be any more inherently flimsy than any other interpreted language?

I'd say that it at least feels this way, because the "global state" in a shell program depends on a lot more properties of the system than the "global state" of a Python program. C/C++ or even entirely static binaries from Go for example (I'm not a Go expert) all eliminate state being 'imported' from the host machine.

[mbrock]

Sure, if the external tools used by the script change, the script's behavior will change... Other languages somewhat solve this with versioned dependencies, but even that's not quite sufficient, which is how come all the rage about reproducible builds. But yeah, good point.