[mbrock]

Effective bash programming involves invoking other Unix commands. That's what the shell is for, after all. I don't know off the top of my head what you'd use for matrix multiplication; I guess it depends.

For another example, jq and jshon are excellent tools for querying, transforming, or creating JSON values.

My experience is that programming by composing Unix programs that communicate via pipes and files can be very pleasant and productive.

Sometimes I lament aspects of bash syntax and semantics, but it's also much more convenient than other scripting languages for tasks related to spawning programs and pipelines and working with files.

One of my recent projects that I've been having a lot of fun with is a kind of continuous integration system built mostly with bash scripts. It involves a lot of calls to git and Docker, process manipulation, file descriptor redirection, and file system manipulation—and bash makes all this pretty easy and concise.