[masklinn]

> If you try to use shell as a general purpose programming language, of course it sucks.

> If you treat shell as a DSL for files and streams, nothing can beat it. Shell is amazing.

The problem is that any non-trivial shell script is a mix of the two, so you find yourself torn apart by the inconvenience of "file and streams" in most languages (though really it's mostly subprocesses), and the inconvenience of literally everything else in shells.

[amalcon]

This is the one space where I actually like Perl: for shell scripts that grew up a bit, but still amount to mostly manipulating text files and streams.

[dijit]

I often find myself composing smaller programs which I then call/pipe/chain with bash, this looks pretty messy because I’m a sysadmin, not a programmer.

But I do think it works better than trying to do everything in one place.