[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...)