[amorphid]

I agree that writing long, monolithic scripts isn't optimal, but there's no reason you can't break a large script into multiple smaller scripts. And there are certain tasks where <programming language of choice> won't offer any advantage over using a regular ol' shell script. If one really needs/wants to get into Bash, I'd recommend learning it well enough to make educated decisions about when Bash starts becoming a pain, and the benefits of <programming language of choice> start to kick in. In some cases, a <programming language of choice> will be more of a hinderance than a help, especially in areas where the the functionality you want cannot be found in the standard library.