[ghettoimp]

While it's certainly not the worst, and certainly can be used for many things, bash is definitely pretty damn bad. You've got horrible string escaping nonsense ($IFS, ...), an utter lack of any sensible types, constant incompatibilities due to command-line tools supporting different arguments on different platforms, ...

While Perl or similar are not without many faults, at least they solve a lot of this. Think of even writing something like a JSON parser in bash... it's horrifying.

[arpa]

You could use something like jq for parsing JSON. And while I agree with you regarding some of your points, they could be easily refuted by pointing fingers at other things: yes, string escaping can give a grown man nightmares, but hey, it's not working with strings in C; and once you get the hang of it, it is pretty simple. Lack of typing can hurt, sure - but it's not BASIC; With a little imagination you can have strict types even.

And cli tools having different args on different platforms? come on, it's not even bash's fault...

Basically what i'm saying, everything you can do on $LANG, you can do in bash. And it's not that hard. It just has a loooong learning curve and seems to provide with just enough things to shoot yourself in the foot. But then again, you can be stupid in any language...

[ghettoimp]

I agree that CLI tools having different args on different platforms is certainly not bash's fault, but I think it hurts Bash much more than other languages because, since Bash is such a limited ("awful") programming language, the de-facto way of doing most anything in bash is to call out to these command-line tools for everything.

For instance, above you suggest using "jq" to parse JSON. I totally agree with you that if you actually needed to deal with some JSON data in Bash for some reason, then a tool like "jq" is definitely the way to do it, because it avoids trying to do actual programming in Bash.

In any "more reasonable" scripting language (perl/python/ruby/...), you can very easily open files, parse them, extract data, etc., all within the context of the language, without relying on all these external tools like awk/sed/grep/etc. And you have basic types like arrays and maps at your disposal that often make what you're trying to do a lot easier.

I can't imagine trying to actually write a JSON parser in pure bash. (Well, I can... but uggggh...)